By Richard Winters
My Rating: 7 out of 10
4-Word Review: Pretending to be female.
Michael (Dustin Hoffman) is a talented actor but having difficulty finding employment due to his demanding nature and inability to get along with directors. His friend Sandy (Teri Garr) is auditioning for a part in a soap opera, and he helps her prepare for the role and even takes her to the audition only to learn that she was rejected before given any chance to do a screentest. It’s at this same time that he learns his agent George (Sydney Pollack) hasn’t gotten him a chance to audition for another role because in his words ‘no one will work with him’. Michael then decides to disguise himself as a woman named Dorothy Michaels in an effort to get the role that Sandy was turned down for so as to raise money to produce a play that will star Sandy. While he does get the part, he also becomes a big star with everyone believing that Dorothy really is a woman, which cause many complications in both his personal and professional life making him feel like he wants to end the charade and go back to his normal identity, but not quite sure how to do it.
The genesis for the story began all the way back in 1970 and was based on an off-Broadway play by Don McGuire titled ‘Would I Lie to You?’ about an out of work stage actor who dresses as a woman to get a big part. Director Dick Richards adapted the plot into a screenplay, and it got shopped around for many years, but to no avail. Then in 1980 cross-dressing actor Christopher Morley played the role of a woman named Sally Armitage in the soap opera ‘General Hospital’. The part was played straight with the viewers under the impression that it really was a female, and Sally even gained the romantic interest from the character Luke, played by Anthony Geary, only to eventually reveal that she was really a man, which was a ratings hit and thus lead to renewed interest in this script. Eventually Dustin Hoffman got a hold of it and decided he wanted to take it on under the condition that was given full creative control and even hired his own people, Larry Gelbert and Murra Schisgal, to rewrite the story to his liking.
Personally, my favorite parts of the film come at the beginning where we see Michael’s struggles as an actor as well as all of his thespian friends giving one a glimpse at just how hard the business is and how few people can make an actual living in it. Watching both him and his roommate Jeff, played by Bill Murray, working as waiters, but still talking about their acting ambitions while on that job was on-target. Garr gives a great performance as a struggling would-be actress who is full of insecurities and letdowns and a perfect composite of many young women who find the auditioning process grueling and thankless and for this reason, I felt she should’ve won the Oscar instead of Jessica Lange as her part as the love interest wasn’t as interesting, or honest.
Murray is terrific as the roommate in an unusual part for him as his over-the-top clownish, snarky, frat boy persona is kept under wraps and instead he plays the part straight, but his sardonic responses to things are great. Director Pollack, who took on the role of Michael’s agent at the request of Hoffman and thus making it his first acting role in almost 20 years, is quite good too particularly with how his exasperated nature feeds off of Hoffman’s hyper one and their conversation inside his office is the movie’s highlight. Charles Durning has a few key moments as well playing Lange’s lovesick father who begins to fall for Dorothy though any man that would give a woman an engagement ring before they’d even been out on a single date has to be a bit loopy.
Hoffman falls into the woman role easily and it would be hard to recognize him had the viewer not known about the disguise beforehand though I felt the way Dorothy walked and moved her hands and arms made her seem like Mrs. Butterworth the animated character from the maple syrup commercials. It’s also hard to imagine he wouldn’t have been found out a lot sooner especially since he collected a weekly paycheck from the company, which would’ve required him to give them his social security number, which in-turn would’ve exposed who he really was. Being on magazine covers where he supposedly does interviews as Dorothy should’ve been equally problematic as the reporters would’ve asked him (her) about her past like what other stuff did she act in, where was she from, and where did she graduate. Stuff that’s very much standard questions in any interview and when he (she) couldn’t come up with anything or made-up stuff that could easily be background checked would’ve then raised red flags and brought the ruse to a very quick halt.
Spoiler Alert!
Soap operas were no longer broadcast as live and hadn’t been since 1963, so that story angle doesn’t fly either. Yes, I realize the idea was that it was taped and only had to done live as an emergency when one of the tapes got destroyed, but in reality, the taping would’ve been done so far ahead (usually by several weeks) that even if a video did somehow get corrupted there still should’ve been plenty of time to refilm it before reaching the actual air date.
The ending it a bit disappointing as well. Sure, it’s nice seeing Lange putting her arm around him as they walk down the sidewalk showing that the two had made up after his secret identity was exposed, but it doesn’t answer what happened to his career. He did this whole thing to help finance a play for Sandy, so what became of that? Also, were casting agents so impressed with the way he fooled everybody that they now were willing to hire him, or was he still blacklisted? These were all major motivations for why he did the ruse, so there should’ve been clarity to what became of it.
My Rating: 7 out of 10
Released: December 17, 1982
Runtime: 1 Hour 56 Minutes
Rated PG
Director: Sydney Pollack
Studio: Columbia Pictures
Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, YouTube
Scopophilia 