In one of the very last scenes of Hustlers, Jennifer Lopez’s Ramona sits across from a journalist, Elizabeth (Julia Stiles), explaining her part in the scam that effectively ended her stripping career. Ramona calls herself a people person and it’s obviously true from the way she candidly shares her story with the other woman, pulling out the contents of her purse to show her the valuable trinkets she keeps with her at all times. She affectionately shows Elizabeth a baby photo of her former accomplice Destiny (Constance Wu), cooing over how precious she looks as a baby and wondering how anyone could ever abandon her. “I keep this so I always have her with me,” she says, smiling down at the photo. And that, folks, is Hustlers.
Don’t get me wrong — a whole lot of other stuff happens before and after that scene. (The film would be awfully short if it was just Lopez fawning over a baby photo.) The Lorene Scafaria-directed heist film, inspired by Jessica Pressler’s 2015 article published in New York Magazine, “The Hustlers at Scores,” chronicles the story of a group of strippers who begin conning their rich Wall Street clients in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. We learn the sordid tale from the perspective of Destiny during an interview with Elizabeth in 2014, seven years after she first meets Ramona, her future mentor and coringleader.
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