Sydney Pollack (1982)
The big winner at the 1983 Academy Awards was Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, which landed eight Oscars from eleven nominations, including Best Picture. Not for the first or last time, the Academy was rewarding worthy subject matter rather than film-making quality and flair, and did so chiefly at the expense of examples of Hollywood at its entertaining best. Attenborough, named Best Director, acknowledged retrospectively, and decently, that ‘I was certain that not only would ET win, but that it should win. It was inventive, powerful [and] wonderful. I make more mundane movies’. What is still Spielberg’s finest film won only four Oscars from nine nominations but still did better than the other most-nominated picture of the year: Tootsie took home a single statuette from ten nominations. Sydney Pollack’s singular romantic comedy, which is also a satire and celebration of acting, shares two of the three main qualities Richard Attenborough ascribed to ET. Tootsie wasn’t exactly ‘powerful’ but, forty years on and seen through the lens of a much changed understanding of sexual and gender politics, it stands up impressively well. And the film remains, as Pauline Kael described it in December 1982, ‘marvellous fun’.
Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) is a New York City actor whose intransigent perfectionism has made him unemployable. He earns a crust waiting tables and teaching acting classes but is desperate for performing work and the funds to produce and star in a play written by his flatmate, Jeff Slater (Bill Murray). When Sandy Lester (Teri Garr), Michael’s student and girlfriend, goes for the role of new hospital administrator Emily Kimberly on popular daytime soap ‘Southwest General’ and gets turned down, Michael drags up to audition for the role, calling himself Dorothy Michaels, and lands it. Portraying Emily as a feisty feminist, Michael/Dorothy repeatedly goes off script, primarily in order to fend off the pawing attentions of John van Horn (George Gaynes), the soap veteran and inveterate skirt-chaser who plays senior medic Dr Brewster. The show’s director Ron Carlisle (Dabney Coleman), a fellow sexist, doesn’t like Dorothy’s approach but Rita Marshall (Doris Belack), the canny producer, wants to see how it plays with audiences. Emily Kimberly is a popular sensation. Michael succeeds in holding down an acting job.
The transvestite enterprise also generates more and more complicated personal relationships. Michael falls for his soap co-star Julie Nichols (Jessica Lange): on set, she’s a nurse, outside work, a single mother in a toxic relationship with Ron Carlisle. Michael, as Michael, approaches Julie at a party and gets wine thrown in his face. On another occasion, he can’t, even as Dorothy, quite control his feelings, startling Julie, who has come to value Dorothy as a friend and source of motherly advice. On the point of breaking up with Ron, Julie invites Dorothy for a weekend at the home of Julie’s widowed father, Les (Charles Durning), who’s charmed by his daughter’s mature companion. Soon after, he invites Dorothy to dinner in a New York restaurant and proposes marriage. Dorothy pleads for time to think the offer over and dashes home, only to find she’s been followed there by John van Horn. He tells Dorothy he’s crazy for her, then discovers, when Jeff appears on the scene, that she’s evidently spoken for. The exhaustingly insecure Sandy hasn’t been sure about Michael since she caught him trying on her clothes. No sooner has van Horn left the apartment than Sandy is banging on the door. Jeff lets her in and keeps her talking while Michael gets out of his Dorothy kit and back into his own. When Sandy confronts him, he admits that he’s in love with another woman – without mentioning the other men in love with the woman he’s pretending to be.
Larry Gelbart, Murray Schisgal and Don McGuire shared the screenplay credit though at least two other well-known names, Barry Levinson and Elaine May, also had a hand in the writing. All the prime movers on Tootsie, behind and in front of the camera, were steeped in the worlds of Broadway, Off Broadway, Hollywood and American television. It really shows. Sydney Pollack is also on screen, as George Fields, Michael’s agent. George is a coiled spring, trying and usually failing to keep calm when he’s talking to the exasperating Michael. Pollack the director transmits nervous energy to the narrative. The film, especially in its early stages, moves at a terrific pace – the opening summary of Michael’s travails in New York theatre is elating – but is never out of control. As the plot thickens, the tempo becomes increasingly varied.
Tootsie has a top-class cast to match its script: impeccably orchestrated, they make the abundant dialogue sing. Michael/Dorothy is a double act tailor-made for Dustin Hoffman. Michael’s egocentric quest for perfection chimes with the reputation of the man playing him. Dorothy is a showcase for Hoffman’s theatrical appetite and aplomb. He makes the one desperately maddening, the other likeable and both of them a pleasure to watch. It adds up to the performance(s) of Hoffman’s career. Jessica Lange (the film’s lone Oscar winner) completely embodies the dream girl that Julie is to Michael but Lange’s lovely naturalistic acting creates a real person to go with the ideal image. Teri Garr’s vivid hysteria is a reminder of the star she might have been in the golden age of Hollywood screwball comedy.
The male supporting roles include three splendidly different contributions. Charles Durning is very witty and even more touching, Bill Murray’s deadpan delivery an invaluable complement to the prevailing emotional mayhem. (It peaks in Jeff’s mock-appalled response to Dorothy’s unlooked for romantic involvements – ‘You … slut’). Best of all is the director himself. Sydney Pollack hadn’t acted for years; it was Hoffman who persuaded him to play George Fields. The first exchange between them – culminating in a litany of Michael’s infuriating demands, whatever acting job he’s on – is an all-time favourite of mine:
Michael: Are you saying that nobody in New York will work with me?
George: No, no – that’s too limiting. Nobody in Hollywood wants to work with you either. I can’t even send you up for a commercial. You played a tomato for 30 seconds and they went a half-day over schedule because you wouldn’t sit down-
Michael: Yes – it wasn’t logical.
George: You were a tomato! A tomato doesn’t have logic – a tomato can’t move!
Michael: That’s what I said – so if it can’t move, how’s it going to sit down?
Dabney Coleman, originally cast as George, has had a variously successful television career: in the cinema, he’s unfortunately best known for two egregious sexist roles but he’s much better in Tootsie than in Nine to Five (1980). George Gaynes is excellent, both as the increasingly bewildered John van Horn, and as Dr Brewster: he delivers the latter’s lines (whenever he can manage to read the autocue) in orotund tones that anticipate Duncan Preston’s magnificent parody of soap actorly delivery in ‘Acorn Antiques’. Native New Yorker Doris Belack is spot on as the TV producer who has seen it all, at least until Dorothy Michaels appears on camera. Geena Davis dazzles in her screen debut, the small part of actress April Page, who plays another of Southwest General’s nubile nurses, and has learned how to steer clear of the show’s resident lechers.
I feared that Tootsie revisited might now be uncomfortable to watch. In fact, it seems almost politically prescient. The clue is in the title. ‘Tootsie’ is one of the dubious terms of endearment which Ron Carlisle addresses to Dorothy on set and to which she responds: ‘My name is Dorothy. Not “Tootsie,” not “Toots,” not “Honey,” not “Sweetie,” not “Doll.”’ Roger Ebert praised the film for making ‘some light-hearted but well-aimed observations about sexism’. For plenty of viewers today, the light-heartedness alone will be enough to condemn Tootsie without qualification, male sexual entitlement being, by definition, not a laughing matter. But for those of us still willing to accept as a major function of comedy the skewering of all manner of undesirable attitudes and behaviour, the film is a highly effective example of treating a serious subject within a comedic frame. Even better (though this too might damn the film from a narrowly PC point of view), the protagonist’s discovery of what it’s like to be a woman is always anchored in Michael’s character. Pauline Kael again: ‘… Michael finds himself when he’s Dorothy … because when he’s Dorothy he’s acting. He’s such a dedicated, fanatical actor that he comes fully alive only when he’s playing a role …’
Despite Tootsie‘s extraordinary momentum, you’re always wondering how and when Michael is going to come clean. It eventually happens when, with the show’s producers keen to extend Dorothy’s contract for another year, a technical problem forces ‘Southwest General’ to be aired live, and Michael seizes his chance to improvise. Dorothy removes her spectacles and false eyelashes, tears off her wig, drops her accent and vocal register, and declares her/himself to be not Emily but Edward Kimberly, the avenging twin brother of the late Anthea Kimberly (it’s a long story), ‘proud enough to be the woman who was the best part of my manhood, the best part of myself’. Pollack cuts to reactions in the studio and of armchair viewers beyond it. Sandy screams. A cameraman faints. Les drops most of his sandwich, bites grimly on the bit remaining. Jeff observes, ‘That is one nutty hospital …’ Ron Carlisle declares, ‘I knew there was a reason she didn’t like me!’ It’s a hard coup de théâtre to follow but Pollack does so nicely. Wandering unhappily through Central Park, Michael approaches a mime in whiteface, thinks about dropping money in his hat but decides to push him over instead.
There’s barely a weak moment in most of Tootsie’s 116 minutes. A photo-shoot montage, summarising Dorothy’s meteoric rise to cover-girl celebrity, is a delight but it detracts from Michael’s subsequent argy-bargy with George Fields about the gender-discriminatory pay increase offered Dorothy: she has become too big a star to earn less than even an ill-fated male patient on ‘Southwest General’. It may have been self-effacement on Pollack’s part that led him to omit George’s reaction to Michael’s big reveal; whatever the reason, you feel the lack. The film’s two original songs – the title track and ‘It Might Be You’ (both with music by Dave Grusin, lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman) – aren’t up to much. Only in the closing stages, though, does Tootsie start to struggle, as it’s bound to do. It’s not only Michael who has to extricate himself from a knotty situation: so does the script.
Outside ‘The Syracuse Playhouse’ a poster advertises ‘Return to the Love Canal’ – Jeff’s play, starring Michael Dorsey and Sandy Lester. Next door is Injun Joe’s bar, which we know from earlier dialogue is one of Les Nichols’s favourite haunts. Michael goes in to face the music. The exchange between Charles Durning and Dustin Hoffman is beautifully played but their reconciliation is too easily achieved. This applies even more to the closing sequence, in which Michael approaches Julie outside the television studios. When he removed his disguise, Michael looked not into camera but at Julie to address the words ‘the woman who was the best part of my manhood’. He now expands on this idea, telling Julie:
‘I was a better man with you, as a woman, with you, than I ever was as a man, with a woman. … I learned a few things about myself being Dorothy. I just have to learn to do it without the dress.’
What makes Julie’s, and her father’s, attachments to Dorothy special is that, as well as being funny, they feel truthful: this is a different order of comedy from Some Like It Hot (1959). Julie is processing the loss of her friend Dorothy, as well as Michael’s deception. She couldn’t do either quickly – and even this formidable team of acting, writing and directing talents can’t bring off the instant happy ending. But the exhilarating journey to that destination makes Tootsie one of the 1980s’ most richly entertaining films.
21 April 2022
