Title: Tootsie
Rating: 2 Stars
As I have been making my way through the 2008 AFI Best Films list, occasionally I’ve been hard on some of the older films for reasons that probably aren’t fair to them. There are films that weren’t really controversial at all in their time but in the lens of the current day, now appear problematic. I’m talking in particular about Fred Astaire’s extended black face scenes in Swing Time (not to mention that as a good guy protagonist his character is actually kind of an asshole) as well as the decidedly Pro-South Civil War points of view of the films The General and Gone With The Wind.
Just to prove that it’s not only films from the 1920s and 1930s that I have such concerns about, along comes 1982’s Tootsie.
It’s the story of a chronically unemployed actor named Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) who is talented but difficult to work with. Desperate to get some money so that he can produce his roommate’s play, he learns of an opening for a female character on a soap opera. Knowing that he’s now essentially unemployable as himself, Dorsey dresses up as a woman and auditions for the role. Of course he gets it. He now assumes an alternate identity as Dorothy Michaels.
As Dorothy, Michael demonstrates independence, much to the consternation of the chauvinistic director, Ron Carlisle (Dabney Coleman). The other (real) women, heretofore having no such independence, cheers him (her) on. Dorsey finds himself falling for the leading lady of the soap, Julie Nichols (Jessica Lange), who is currently in a relationship with Carlisle. In a comedic turn, Nichols widowed father, Les Nichols (Charles Durning), begins to fall for Dorothy.
Merry madcap mishaps ensue.
Before I start to talk about the film, I find it interesting to remember how big of a thing soap operas were in the 1980s. I just looked. On the major networks, there are 4, count them 4, soap operas still on. In the 1980s, soap operas were huge. Each of the three networks had many hours of them on every day and they were, without question, part of the cultural conversation. Some of these shows were started in the 1950s or the 1960s and were still going strong decades later. Giant shows like All My Children, As The World Turns, Guiding Light, and One Life To Live are now all gone. Soap operas, if I recollect correctly, were filmed largely in New York City. Since a lot of them were an hour a day, five days a week, they were legitimate vehicles for struggling actors to find work. Watching Tootsie, I realized that that was an entire part of the entertainment world that was just basically overcome by events, the victim both of women no longer staying at home during the day and the high cost of producing a scripted show as opposed to game shows or talk shows.
Now, about the film. In its day, it was considered progressive. Here is a previously chauvinistic actor (Dorsey) learning what it really means to be a woman and becoming better from the experience. As Dorsey tells Nichols after he appears as his true self, “I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man”.
That’s well and good, but look at the message behind the message. The women in the film start to exert their independence only after a man disguised as a woman blazes the path for them. The underlying message seemed to be that the women really needed a man to show them how to live a freeing life. That seems problematic to me now.
In another scene, Dorsey, dressed as Dorothy, is actually the victim of an attempted rape. It’s played as a joke. A doddering, oversexed, drunk man just can’t resist the charms of Dorothy and tries to aggressively pull her to a couch. With #MeToo, this no longer really seems like comedic material.
There’s another character named Sandy Lester (Teri Garr) that I haven’t mentioned yet. Lester and Dorsey are longtime friends. Lester catches Dorsey in a compromising position, and instead of trying to explain, he starts an affair with her. Let’s just start with the fact that it’s almost as if Lester has no agency at all. Dorsey decides that they should have sex and they do. He then promptly abandons her. This is before Dorsey has learned the errors of his way, so I guess this is to show his growth when he apologizes to her. I guess. However, after the apology, the Lester character essentially disappears. As far as I can tell, she literally existed as a character so that Dorsey can have sex with her, abandon her, and then kind of feel bad about it.
Finally, there’s Dustin Hoffman himself. He has been caught up in the #MeToo movement. Multiple women have accused him of sexual harassment, including a woman that was, at the time, a 17 year old intern on the set of a film that he was starring in. Besides those actual potentially criminal allegations, in the name of acting, he’s done some pretty questionable things to female actors to illicit ‘true’ performances out of them. Knowing that, seeing him in this role is unsettling.
Interestingly enough, this is not the only cross dressing film on the AFI list. There is also Some Like It Hot. Somehow that film still seems enjoyable as a comedy. This could be because it’s not even trying to make some deeper social statement. It’s much more of like, hey, look at these dudes in dresses being silly, aka Bosom Buddies if you want to translate that film to its 1980s equivalent.
I first watched Tootsie in the theater back when it was released and I remember enjoying it. Because of some combination of all of what I just discussed plus nearly 40 years of cultural change, Tootsie just no longer seems that funny to me.
dorkenstein 