'American Gigolo' Review: A Perfectly Cast Jon Bernthal Can't Save This Misogynistic Mess

An Armani-clad Richard Gere cruising down the Pacific Coast Highway in a black Mercedes-Benz as Blondie’s “Call Me” blares, sets the tone not only for Paul Schrader’s classic neo-noir “American Gigolo,” but also, as Karina Longworth posits in the latest season of her podcast You Must Remember This, the erotic ’80s. So, of course, this deep into the era of reboots, the film was ripe for a television re-imagining. Unfortunately, the three episodes provided to critics of the prequel-sequel-requel starring an aptly-cast Jon Bernthal, flattens everything that was interesting about the film, while also somehow stretching everything for far too long. 

The original film ends with Gere’s high-end male escort Julian in prison after being framed for murder, with the love of his life Michelle (Lauren Hutton) leaving her loveless marriage with a state politician to be by his side. The ending was borrowed from Robert Bresson’s 1959 film “Pickpocket,” both bittersweet love stories that take high crimes to bring two people together. 

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Bernthal is a spot-on casting to play Julian. He, like Gere, has a softness to his masculinity. A vulnerability is always there, just below the surface. He also looks a heck of a lot like Gere did in 1980. It’s a shame then that showrunner David Hollander seems to have completely misread the themes of the earlier film, leaving Bernthal stranded in a show that is mostly just rote police procedural.

After a deathbed confession and some DNA evidence clear Julian of the crime for which he was imprisoned, Det. Sunday, who put him away fifteen years earlier, here played by Rosie O’Donnell doing quite a fun riff on Hector Elizondo’s performance in the film, tells him he’s free to go. The rest of the episodes screened for critics follow Julian as he gets back into his old life, including seeking out Michelle, now played by Gretchen Mol in an absolutely horrendous wig. This Michelle has been stripped of all the agency the character had at the end of the film, not only still stuck in a terrible marriage with her skeevy politician husband Richard (Leland Orser) but also only exists on screen as either the dreamgirl in Julian’s flashbacks or a beleaguered wife-mother with no life of her own.

Everything must have an origin story these days, so not only is this a sequel, but it’s also a prequel in which we learn that Julian got into sex work by way of an abusive mother and child sex trafficking. Where Schrader’s film shows sex workers as workers with good and bad days like anyone else, here the show distills them all to stereotypes of trauma and coercion. While Schrader’s film acknowledged rough tricks and other unsavory aspects of the trade, Julian also gives multiple speeches about feeling fulfilled by giving women pleasure. In the series, there is no sex positivity. All the sex here is vile and mostly done without consent. While Schrader’s film understands sex can be a power struggle, especially where work is involved, this show seems to conclude that sex is always a violation. There’s still plenty of time for the series to explore the sex trafficking aspect with more depth, but the way it is utilized in the first three episodes mostly serves to further the series’ overarching anti-sex stance.

For a show that seems to hate sex, there are still plenty of naked women, their breasts bare for all the world to see. Yet we never once see full-frontal male nudity. Which is particularly odd considering “American Gigolo” was notable upon its release in 1980 for being one of the first mainstream Hollywood films to have its male star go full frontal. There are still five episodes that weren’t shared with critics for review, but it seems unlikely that the show will catch up with the equitable nudity of its source material.

There’s also a subplot where Michelle is trying to find her teenage son, who has run off with his tutor. It’s clear that the son will later be revealed as actually Julian’s son which is eyerollingly cliche in and of itself. But what’s worse is the frankly disgusting way it’s handled. The kid is 15 years old and his tutor 37, yet never once is their relationship discussed as pedophilia. There’s even a scene with the two together in a motel bed that is filmed so tenderly I had to question if the crew even realized what they were depicting. 

But then comes the violence. The tutor is brutally murdered – on screen – by Richard’s fixer, which, through some utterly ridiculous coincidence, traps Julian inside yet another murder being investigated by Det. Sunday. Both this murder and the murder for which Julian was imprisoned before the show begins are shown in grisly detail, with women’s bodies violated and covered in blood. In the film, while the murder is described, Schrader only shows the victim’s body via a small, crumpled, black and white police photograph. It seems in the four decades between the projects, we’ve traded sex-positivity in a mainstream Hollywood film for graphic misogynistic violence on streaming television. 

Aside from all the rampant misogyny, Bernthal is just not given room to breathe in this role. Because it’s trying to be both a sequel and prequel there is so much cutting between scenes with gratuitous flashbacks intended to spell out exactly what Julian is feeling – or why – at any given moment. Bernthal doesn’t ever get to build anything with his character. Instead of building character through great conversation set pieces and using dialogue and body language to develop relationships, this series would rather show the audience a pensive Bernthal thinking and then cut to a quick flash of a cheesy moment between him and Michelle in the past, than trust the actors to transmit their deep connection through a scene together in the present. 

Of course, a reinterpretation would need to pull a few strings from Schrader’s tidy plotting and taut filmmaking, but when the result is both a total misread of the source material and an overly dawn out slog, you have to question what the point was of revisiting this material in the first place. Towards the end of the pilot episode, there’s a slowed-down cover of “Call Me,” in that style that is so en vogue now where a pop song is drained of all its energy in order to make it more “serious” and “evocative.” But really, all these covers do is make the songs lifeless, dulling their impact and emotions. Which I guess is an apt metaphor for this series that somehow manages to be four times as long as the original without any of the passion, ethical thematics, or style that made it an instant American classic.  [D+]