Spread (2009)

Spread arrives from 2009, a Sundance premiere about a gigolo named Nikki who drifts through Los Angeles living off women with means. Ashton Kutcher plays him with the vacant charm of a man who has never once considered a consequence. Director David Mackenzie keeps the camera at a polite distance, and Anne Heche has said this was deliberate, so that viewers would not be told whom to pity. The result is a film that observes its characters without judging them, which is either restraint or abdication depending on the hour.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is nearly blank. There is no racial consciousness, no environmental concern, no engagement with neurodivergence, and no body-positive sensibility. Bodies here are currency, spent and replenished. The romantic architecture is strictly heterosexual and transactional, so LGBTQ+ themes are absent entirely. Feminist critique is likewise missing in action. Women in this film function as marks, patrons, and obstacles, and the screenplay regards this arrangement with the mild curiosity of a man reading a menu. A few minority performers appear in supporting roles, but the casting registers as ordinary late-2000s ensemble work, not as a statement of any kind.

Wealth saturates the frame, and Nikki briefly feeds on it, which might look like a critique of capital if the film did not so clearly enjoy the penthouses and the pool. Critics at the time noted as much, calling it a celebration of vacuous high life instead of a deconstruction of it. There is no sermon here, no lesson delivered to the audience, and for that small mercy the film deserves a nod. It is not preachy. It is simply hollow, and it knows it.