It's been a little while, but welcome back to the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com!
We're heading back to the early 1980s and the Sydney Pollack-directed romantic comedy Tootsie, starring Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange, Teri Garr and Bill Murray. Hoffman stars as struggling New York actor Michael Dorsey who is such an opinionated perfectionist he's burned all his bridges in town, and his agent (played by Pollack himself) has essentially given up on him. Dorsey's roommate Jeff (Murray in an understated but still very funny performance) has written a quite promising play but the pair have no money to get it off the ground. Dorsey's other close friend and acting student Sandy (Garr) has an audition for a soap opera but is quickly dismissed by the show's misogynistic director (Dabney Coleman) for not looking the part. Dorsey then has the idea to audition for the role himself, in drag, and blows away the show's producers with snappy improvisation and a strong-willed presentation. The character played by "Dorothy Michaels" becomes a sensation with the soap's audience, and Michael finds himself in a conundrum when he not only begins to fall for his co-star Julie (Lange) but the network wants to sign Dorothy to a long-term contract.
I went into this expecting either a kind of exploitation comedy or a cheesy sitcom stretched to two hours, but Tootsie is a surprisingly sweet film that plays with the highly unlikely scenario of someone who looks and sounds like Hoffman passing as a woman, while not delivering the stock payoff. There's a mid-film sequence where Julie, having become very close friends with Dorothy, invites her to her father's house for the weekend and the father (Charles Durning) makes romantic advances toward Dorothy. I fully expected the father to accidentally discover Dorothy's true identity and thus unravel the whole charade, but the film dances near that line without stepping over it. The eventual third-act reveal ends up being much more satisfying than the number of pitfalls the script could've fallen into.
I also enjoyed the realistic, chaotic nature of the dialogue. Like Orson Welles' films, Tootsie understands that conversation between people (particularly in a frenetic scene) should overlap instead of neatly adhering to a rhythm of one person speaking at a time. Hoffman and Garr especially have great chemistry arguing with each other as he leads her on (I did feel sorry for poor Sandy; she deserved better).
The performances are all quite effective. Hoffman plays Michael as a neurotic mess, but finds the best parts of himself and his humanity as Dorothy, standing up for feminism in a way the female soap actors are afraid to. Jessica Lange is tender and open as Julie, a single mom who's grown tired of dating her sexist, dismissive boss. Teri Garr gives the film's funniest performance as Michael's insecure student, so down on her acting abilities she's creatively paralyzed while prepping for her soap audition. And Bill Murray does a lot with his small amount of screen time, only half-assedly warning Michael how insane his situation is. My favorite Murray scene is when Michael is packing for his weekend getaway with Julie and Jeff is teary-eyed and confused, mostly because he's eating a plate full of lemon slices (a detail I assume was Bill's idea).
Tootsie was for me an unexpected delight of a film, one of those gentle 80s comedies like Arthur and Roxanne that doesn't squeeze out a ton of laugh-out-loud moments but nonetheless made me smile throughout most of its running time. Pollack and company could've gone for cheap screwball laughs but instead exercised a patience for subtlety despite the absurd premise, thus giving the film some depth. This film must've been a big influence on 90s comedies like Soapdish and Mrs. Doubtfire.
I give Tootsie ***1/2 out of ****.
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