«Tootsie» turns 40, a still very current gender movie with all perfect actors – Corriere.it

Los Angeles, December 1, 1982. The triumphant preview of Sydney Pollack’s «Tootsie» paves the way for the global success of a film born quietly but destined to remain: it will become the second highest-grossing film of the year in the US (behind only the elusive « ET the Extra-Terrestrial» by Spielberg) and will be included in 2000 by the American Film Institute in second place among the best American comedies of all time, after the somewhat similar «Some like it hot» by Billy Wilder.

Prominent exponent of the now faded New Hollywoodauthor of milestones of the Seventies («Corvo Rosso non hai il mio scalpo», 1972; «Yakuza» and «I tre giorni del Condor», both from 1975) and still capable of imposing his highly personal cinema even at the box office ( had just returned from the great success of «Diritto di cronaca», 1981, with Paul Newman), the director Sydney Pollack decided with «Tootsie» to mark a decisive break with the past, venturing for the first time with an all-round comedy based on of the only apparent lightness of the «clockwork» script written by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal.

And the results were not only extraordinary on the floor of pure entertainment
, but also, more subtly, on that of the “political” analysis in direct contact with a crucial historical moment caught in its infancy: that of America in the 1980s and the feeling of inadequacy of the middle class to the “new objectives” of the fabulous (or fabulous) Reagan welfare. In New York, the good but too perfectionist Strasbergian actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) is forced to make ends meet as a waiter in the company of his flatmate Jeff Slater (Bill Murray), an aspiring playwright, because due to his difficult character he never manages to turn the numerous hearings he attends into scriptures.

He would like to help both his friend and insecure/depressed Sandy (Teri Garr); but he gets into a crisis when his manager George (Sydney Pollack) informs him that because of his arrogance no one in all of America is willing to give him a part anymore. However, when Michael discovers that the role in the soap opera for which Sandy has unsuccessfully auditioned is that of an authoritarian and masculine hospital director, he presents himself to the production en travesti with the name of Dorothy Michaels, immediately making an impression on the producer Rita Marshall (Doris Belack) and her director Ron Carlisle (Dabney Coleman).

Once she gets the part, she finally becomes a star (also in the media), albeit interposed sex: but while the TV series exponentially increases the ratings thanks to her/him, her private life becomes hopelessly complicated. Like Michael, she is in a relationship with Sandy; like Tootsie (as he is nicknamed by Ron), he falls in love with setmate Julie Nichols (Jessica Lange) without being able to declare himself; and with whom she becomes so «friend» that she pushes the girl to introduce her father, her widower Les di her (Charles Durning), who becomes infatuated with «Dorothy» to the point of asking her in marriage.

When the production renews his/her contract for a new season, the pressure will cause him to make the only possible decision: to reveal the great deception to the world. With what consequences? Direct heir of the most sensational screwball comedies of the Hollywood Golden Age (those in which farce and social fable merged into a unicum in which, likewise, realism and a sense of the absurd overflowed one into the other while maintaining a miraculous balance of credibility), «Tootsie» grafts on those mechanisms a reinterpretation of the sexual misunderstanding at the base of «Some like it hot».

Only the Big Apple of 1982 is not the Chicago of 1929; and the protagonist pretends to be a woman not so much to escape the clutches of those who would not have witnessed a massacre as to survive the “moral” massacre of a country which, in order to sell itself populistically as a winner, was plunging its middle class into hell of unemployment and precariousness. And it is in this context that the choice of “transvestism” as the engine of the story acquires a complementary and political dimension. In fact, Michael/Dorothy represents the two coincident and subsumed faces of a single “minority” unease: that is, the need, both of the male and female gender, to face everyday life by wearing “masks” to correspond to the expectations of the world, as well as to try (with difficulty) to demonstrate the existence in reality of that equality between the sexes long theorized by feminism.

Much more than a simple comedy of misunderstandings, “Tootsie” still remains today, forty years later, a very current and almost exemplary “gender movie” for clarity of purpose (albeit, today, perhaps, not very welcome: it is only by putting yourself in the shoes of a woman that a man can she become capable of an egalitarian relationship? Is it only the awareness of consonance with a male vision that really gives a woman the faculty of choice?); but also an actor’s film, all perfect (Oscar to Jessica Lange; the only one out of ten nominations received in the year in which the forgotten “Gandhi” made a clean sweep of the major awards), and a screenwriting lesson (where the «expedient» does not replace the story, as unfortunately often happens in contemporary cinema which ends in the enunciation of a gimmick).