Wednesday 8 November 2017

1,001 Films: "Tootsie" (1982)


The fondly regarded Tootsie has struggling, temperamental actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) put an end to a run of failed auditions by dragging up as no-nonsense, Marge Simpson-voiced Southern belle Dorothy Michaels, and thereby winning a role in a prime-time hospital drama. The Dave Grusin score accompanying this triumph of the willy can safely be filed away under the heading "Eighties aspirational", and Sydney Pollack's direction, reliant as it is on montages to nudge events along, proves functional at best. The real strength of the film - and the reason it has endured into today's television schedules - is Larry Gelbart's script, a relic from a time when one of the fundamentals of American screen comedy was a sense of craft. Yes, Hoffman in a dress is quite amusing (for a bit), but his gender-bending, in Gelbart's hands, is a pretext for something more than just pratfalls and slapstick, as wasn't the case with Big Momma's House, Norbit, White ChicksSorority Boys, or any of the other crossdressing comedies that emerged in Tootsie's wake. 

Nor is the film solely reliant on Hoffman: a superlative supporting cast includes Jessica Lange, natural and touching as the co-star Dorsey falls for, a typically droll Bill Murray as Dorsey's flatmate, and the sexy-funny Teri Garr as his hypochondriac lover. Its sexual politics remain an area for debate, and may still be a holdover from the (predominantly male) TV writers' rooms of the Seventies: though they yield a cherishably unexpected love triangle (Hoffman, Lange and Charles Durning as the latter's father, who starts crushing on Dorsey-as-Dorothy), the soap, its actresses, and the viewing public here find themselves liberated by a bloke (albeit a bloke in a dress), which seems a funny rewrite of feminism. Unemployed and under-employed actors among us can, however, safely be referred to the opening twenty minutes, still one of cinema's sparkiest evocations of what it is to try and be somebody else for a living.

Tootsie is available on DVD through Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, and on Blu-Ray through Criterion. 

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