No one will work with Michael Dorsey. Played by Dustin Hoffman, he’s the main character in
Tootsie. An intense, intelligent actor in Manhattan, he’s also difficult and needs to rationalize everything, often driving directors mad with his “suggestions” and “helpful hints”. He’s so method and exacting that when he played a tomato in a Fruit of the Loom ad, he refused to take direction because it’s not logical for a tomato to do that. His agent angrily bellows at him, “You were a tomato! A tomato doesn’t have logic!” At the end of this conversation, the agent (also the film’s director, Sydney Pollack) informs Michael that no one will work him in New York … or in Hollywood, for that matter.
Just before this meeting, Michael took his acting colleague and needy sometime lover Sandy (underrated comic genius Teri Garr) to an audition for a soap opera. The part required someone “different”. In what must be a stroke of genius or pure insanity, Michael dons a wig and women’s clothing to another audition for the same, and is nearly turned away by the soap’s lecherous director (Dabney Coleman) until Michael, as “Dorothy Michaels”, hits him and jumps into a tirade on gender parity and unfair casting practice. A casting director, who happens to be a woman, steps in and gives “Dorothy” the part. Before the success of
Mrs. Doubtfire, the cross-dressing comedy that everyone remembers and loves is
Tootsie.
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| Michael Dorsey (Hoffman) |
Dorothy faces the world differently at work. Michael’s a straight man simply playing the part of a woman (playing the part of another woman) just for the money. He knows his reputation for being difficult has preceded him, he’s losing parts, and he needs a steady job to pay the rent on a flat he shares with a deadpan playwright (Bill Murray in an amazing film debut). He shares his dressing room with a perpetually half-naked bombshell, played by Geena Davis in her feature film acting debut. An aging, vain actor (George Gaynes, two years before he starred on Punky Brewster) pursues Dorothy romantically at work and in her private life, and Michael doesn’t have the guts to tell Sandy that he won the part in the soap opera. (Sandy is a study in comic paranoia.) Dorothy becomes close at work with his co-star Julie (Jessica Lange, who won an Oscar for her performance), falling for her even as Dorothy coaches Julie on how to stand up for herself against the director with whom she’s been having an affair. To complicate things further and build up a rising comic house of cards is the presence of Julie’s father (Charles Durning), who falls madly in love with Dorothy. At some point, the deceptions wear Michael down, and the only two people who can keep his secret are his agent and the playwright, who advises Dorothy, “don’t play hard to get” on a date, because that’ll just make the man want her more, right?
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| Julie with "Dorothy" |
Released at Christmas 1982,
Tootsie was a runaway smash. This film’s antics remain a master class in how you do cross-dressing situational comedy right. Why? Because while the characters respond to Michael / Dorothy’s antics, and he may be playing them all the fool, they themselves are not foolish. With a couple of exceptions, these are warm, funny people with their own neuroses, insecurities and foibles with which to contend. The longer he spends in character as Dorothy, the more Michael sees with his very eyes the rampant sexism prevalent in the acting profession and the world at large. He grows sensitive to Dorothy’s needs, because his experience enhances and informs his mindset. Hoffman himself said he spent weeks in drag on the streets of New York, where no one noticed him but where he saw the world through a woman’s eyes for the first time. It’s not a surprise that his performance in the dual role of Michael / Dorothy is so on the nose: he’s lived this out. Even the film’s title comes from a sexist nickname given to Dorothy when the director forgot her name.
