Tootsie

Director: Sydney Pollack
Year Released: 1982
Rating: 2.0

Bland movie about sexual politics - the AFI, in a moment of dazed lunacy, said this was the funniest film ever made. I don't find the concept - a man dressing up like a woman (and having everyone "buy into it") to get an acting gig - at all interesting (the TV show Bosom Buddies, with Tom Hanks, pretty much covered this territory and did it better; alternately, Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot is the definitive cross-dressing picture) or revolutionary or meaningful, and the treatment here does not exactly break new ground. I can't believe that the people in the picture could be so mindless as to actually buy Dustin Hoffman as a woman - this, in itself, proves that all the other characters are idiots - or actually attracted to his "female" alter ego. The attempt to add multiple layers to the flat, noxious play reaches a crescendo when Hoffman speaks to Jessica Lange about how he wants the "female side" of himself to come out when he's not in a dress. Hoffman and Lange are merely adequate - the real interest lies in Sydney Pollack and Bill Murray, who are fantastic sidekicks (Pollack nails his part as Hoffman's frantic agent, baffled and stir crazy; Murray plays ... well, Murray, taking Hoffman's neurotic scenario with a grain of proverbial salt, and adding glibness to the stupendous un-reality). Lame to no end, though a half-a-second Andy Warhol cameo had me yelling and rewinding.