After 25 years, Tootsie still retains its amazing power to make us laugh and think. Part screwball comedy, part love story, Tootsie is able to mix several different plot threads seamlessly and make them work as a whole. Directed by Sydney Pollack and released in December of 1982, Tootsie became a huge financial/critical success and went on to be nominated for 10 Oscars.
Dustin Hoffman stars as Michael Dorsey, a talented but difficult actor who has one of the worst reputations in New York. He fights with directors and doesn’t hesitate to speak his mind. No one will hire him. Michael’s roommate Jeff (Bill Murray) has written a play that Michael wants to produce but it will cost eight thousand dollars and Michael is a broke, out of work actor. As Michael’s frustrated agent (Sydney Pollack doing double duty as actor and director) reminds him, “No one will hire you.”
By chance, Michael accompanies his friend Sandy (Teri Garr) to an audition for a soap opera. The character she is reading for is an older female hospital administrator. When Sandy doesn’t get the part, Michael puts on a wig, false teeth and a dress to become Dorothy Michaels and auditions for the same part. Dorothy nails it and is hired on. Thus begins a series of interwoven complications for Michael/Dorothy.
Dorothy is such a success on the soap that she becomes a pop culture phenomenon and an inspiration to women everywhere because of her insistence on standing up for herself and the other women on the show. She dislikes the show’s director (Dabney Coleman) because of his chauvinism and the way he mistreats the actress Julie (Jessica Lange) who plays a nurse on the show. Dorothy and Julie become friends and confidants.
The problem for Dorothy is that Michael is falling in love with Julie. Then you have Julie’s father Les (Charles Durning) and the soap opera’s resident horn dog appropriately named John Van Horn (George Gaynes) who both fall in love with Dorothy.
Dustin Hoffman is at his best here as Michael/Dorothy playing both an obnoxious male actor and a blunt but likeable female actress. By the end, Michael truly has become a better man from his experience of being a woman and that is where the key to the film lies.
His transformation from one to the other seems effortless and Hoffman was justly rewarded with an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis may be the gold standard for cinematic men in drag but Hoffman is a close second. The supporting cast is one of the best ever assembled for a comedy. Jessica Lange brings a real vulnerability to Julie while Garr is at her neurotic best as Sandy.
Both Lange and Garr were nominated for Best Supporting Actress with Lange winning. Murray, in an unbilled role, gets plenty of laughs and has the best lines in the film. Watch for Geena Davis in her film debut as one of the actresses in the soap opera.
Sydney Pollack’s direction is brisk as he is able to focus on the comedy and the drama that arises from Michael/Dorothy’s duplicity without ever making it seemed forced. This probably comes from the fact that during the shoot, there were no laughs or attempts to be funny.
The actors just played their parts real and straight. The script, by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal with uncredited contributions by a number of writers including Elaine May, is fast paced and provides constant laughs and near disastrous situations for Michael/Dorothy.
There is also a sharp social commentary that delves into the difficulties of being a woman and the double standards that exists for men and woman as well as how friendship and love can be intertwined for better and worse. The snappy, clever dialogue is still fresh and quotable.
Despite being a double dip, this edition of Tootsie is a no-brainer upgrade over the previous DVD that had ZERO extras on it. A 68-minute documentary A Better Man: The Making of Tootsie takes an in-depth look at the origins and production of the film.
It features archived and present day interviews with Dustin Hoffman, Sydney Pollack, Murray Schisgal, Larry Gelbert, Teri Garr, Jessica Lange and Dabney Coleman. It’s fascinating to see Hoffman still get emotional after all these years when talking about Dorothy.
You learn among other things that it was Hoffman’s idea for Pollack to play his agent and that the on screen bickering matched the off screen bickering between the two. Also included are 8 minutes of deleted scenes and two and a half minutes of Hoffman’s screen test footage as Dorothy taken from the original Betamax source.
Tootsie remains one of the most intelligent, engaging comedies ever made, one that can go from screwball comedy to touching love story at a moment’s notice and not ring false. This 25th Anniversary edition boasts a superior looking picture and sound along with quality extras that any fan of the film will love. It’s too bad comedies aren’t made this intelligently anymore.
Tootsie: 25th Anniversary Edition is now available at Amazon . As of yet, there is not a release date for this version of the DVD in the UK. Visit the DVD database for more information.
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