25 years later, 'Tootsie' remains transformative
Film says much about men, women, actors
By Mark Feeney
The Boston Globe
23rd February 2008
Let us begin with a declaration of rank movie heresy. The great American cross-dressing comedy is not
"Some Like It Hot." It is, in fact,
"Tootsie," a 25th-anniversary DVD of which arrives in stores Tuesday.
Yes,
"Some Like It Hot" has Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis at the top of their game (and Jack Lemmon over the top of his). It's also fast and funny and full of terrific lines, including one of the all-time classic kickers.
As that kicker reminds us, though, nobody's perfect. No film is either. But in the matter of cross-dressing comedies,
"Tootsie" comes even closer to perfection than
"Some Like It Hot" does.
For one thing,
"Tootsie" really is a comedy - meaning, a comic movie about characters who are recognizably human; as opposed to a farce, which is what
"Some Like It Hot" is, a comic movie about characters who are recognizable as types and caricatures.
Curtis and Monroe and Lemmon are puppets at the end of Billy Wilder's tightly held strings. There has never been a puppeteer - and that includes Sydney Pollack, the director of
"Tootsie" - capable of yanking around Dustin Hoffman, let alone Bill Murray or the blithely unhinged Teri Garr.
Rather than strings, think of lanyards - that's what cannons have. The miracle of
"Tootsie" is that so many loose can nons - they also include Jessica Lange, Dabney Coleman, Charles Durning, George Gaynes, and Pollack, playing Hoffman's agent - somehow combined to produce such a wondrous comic barrage.
It's a little hard to believe that
"Tootsie" came out 25 years ago - it continues to feel that fresh and unexpected. Certainly, aspects of it have dated. The bows to feminism sound self-conscious, at best, and patronizing, at worst. It's odd seeing characters smoke so much. And Dave Grusin's score sounds like Pat Metheny processed through a sewing machine factory (and for the two Stephen Bishop songs somebody turned off the factory's power supply). Yet what's most striking about
"Tootsie" is how much it remains alive and affecting - in the same way that the best screwball comedy does.
As with all great comedies, the plot is at once simple and ridiculous. Hoffman plays a struggling actor who can't get work, in large part because of his exalted standards. "God forbid you should lose your status as a cult failure," Pollack complains at one point. (That Pollack would keep him on as a client is almost as big an implausibility as the size of the loft Hoffman shares with Murray, a struggling playwright.) Actorliness, even more than sexual identity, is the subtext of
"Tootsie," and its relevance to the firsthand experience of everyone on screen surely contributes to an emotional richness rare in American comedy.
When Garr auditions for a soap opera, her friend Hoffman goes along to offer moral support. She doesn't get the part, but he decides he can - assuming he can pass as a woman. Of course he gets away with it, or there wouldn't be a movie. One of the bonus features on the new DVD is footage of some of Hoffman's first makeup and costume tests. This wasn't a small issue. The reason Wilder shot
"Some Like It Hot" in black and white was that he didn't think audiences would believe Curtis and Lemmon could pass as women if the film were in color.
An even bigger issue was the script. Hoffman says, in a making-of documentary on the DVD, that the original idea was his and the playwright Murray Schisgal's, inspired by the transsexual tennis player Renee Richards. The final story credit went to Don McGuire and Larry Gelbart, the screenplay credit to Gelbart and Schisgal. Pollack, consciously seeking a woman's perspective, brought in Elaine May to doctor the script.
The first thing she said was that Hoffman's character needed a roommate. Hoffman shrank from the idea, he explains on the DVD, until he thought of Murray for the part.
"Tootsie" was the first time Murray showed he had the makings of more (much more) than your standard "SNL"-alum movie career. He's the movie's wild card. He stands outside the intricate plot construction, and at times it's as if he's part of the audience - except he's on screen, of course - watching the action unfold with his ineffable deadpan, offering droll commentary on what's going on around him. His not-quite-stoned detachment is the perfect complement to Hoffman's nervy intensity.
So much of
"Tootsie" hinges on Murray comedically - and on Lange emotionally. She plays the star of the soap opera, a single mother involved in a not very healthy relationship with Coleman, the show's director. Inevitably, Hoffman falls for her. How could he not have? Lange in
"Tootsie" has a mixture of radiance and vulnerability that calls to mind no one so much as, yes, Monroe in
"Some Like It Hot." The movie makes a big deal of Hoffman becoming a better man for having been a woman. But the more interesting transformation - because it's both more subtle and unsure - is Lange's becoming her own woman.
When Lange won the best supporting actress Oscar for
"Tootsie" it was largely seen as a double consolation prize: for her not getting the best actress award, for
"Frances," and for
"Tootsie" not winning any other Oscars. The big winner that year was that lumbering waxworks of worthiness,
"Gandhi." Twenty-five years later, it's obvious how deserving she was. Where Hoffman's bravura star turn is a stunt - a grinning, glorious stunt, but a stunt regardless - Lange's performance is something far richer and more moving. She says on the DVD how odd she felt being surrounded by all these actors with terrific laugh lines and she didn't have any. She shouldn't have worried. If Murray somehow stands apart from the rest of the movie, Lange is its heart.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com. 
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