The Problematics: ‘Tootsie,’ The Movie About A Man Who Was A Better Man When He Was A Woman (Played By Dustin Hoffman)

“I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man,” Dustin Hoffman’s Michael Dorsey says to Jessica Lange’s Julie near the end of Tootsie, the 1982 romantic comedy written by Larry Gelbart and a host of uncredited luminaries (including, it is said, Elaine May) and directed by Sydney Pollack. As anyone who was alive and reading the trades in that era knows, though, the creative locomotive of the movie was Hoffman. The then-megastar bought a script that Charles Evans, eager-to-break-into-showbiz brother of the Notorious Robert Evans, had been working on for a while, and built upon that an apparatus over which he had complete creative control. The better for him to experience for himself some cinematic consciousness raising.

Let me get this out of the way right away: Tootsie is, almost 40 years after its release, still an abundantly entertaining movie. Almost every minutes delivers a zinging line of dialogue, constructively provocative observation, or disarming bit of performance. The only truly unforgivable things about it are those two Stephen Bishop songs accompanying borderline hackneyed montages.

For all that, despite setting itself up as Dustin Hoffman’s gift to the women of the world — and in particular to the woman who looks like Dustin Hoffman trying to make it in the New York acting world of the early ’80s — the romcom portion of the movie is all about Michael Dorsey, the cis-white-male who becomes a soap-opera sensation via female impersonation, in the identity of actress Dorothy Michaels, using his situation to “upgrade” his girlfriend.

In only the second shot of the movie, Michael is yelling at Teri Garr’s Sandy, a friend and a student in his acting class. The early scenes of the movie show Michael’s tribe, struggling people of the New York theater scene, as both a little pretentious and incredibly devoted to their craft. Dorsey’s roommate, Jeff (Bill Murray, terrific in a role that’s both snarky and sincere, a mode he wouldn’t be able to successfully hone further in pictures until the early ’90s with Groundhog Day and Mad Dog and Glory) is an earnest social justice playwright trying to mount a production of his own Return to Love Canal. Sandy’s neuroses and inhibitions prevent her from performing at the top of her potential. And Michael is the “difficult” actor no pragmatic professional wants to perform with. (His scenes with his infuriated agent, played by director Pollack himself, channeling a lot of the real-life frustration Hoffman himself doled out to the guy during the making of the picture, are among the movie’s many comic highlights.)

“Stop being a doormat then,” Michael yells at Sandy while running lines with her for a soap opera part she doesn’t get. Michael subsequently gets the part Sandy auditioned for, disguised as a woman. His motives are to prove his agent wrong, and to make a little money to fund Jeff’s play. Things work out differently. And Michael/Dorothy’s infatuation with the soap’s star Julie, and his revulsion at the way Julie’s treated by her boyfriend, soap director Ron (an archetypal male chauvinist pig perfectly portrayed by Dabney Coleman), have a lot to do with why. (That Dustin Hoffman has in recent years been accused of behavior that resembles that of derriere-patting Ron is curious, to say the least.)

Michael and Sandy, friends going back years, wind up sleeping together by accident. Looking for clothes to wear as Dorothy, Michael finds a nice little number in Sandy’s closet, and disrobes to try it on. At which point Sandy comes out of the shower. To cover himself, Michael says “I want you.” And there they go.

Afterwards, Sandy seems pretty sensible about it. She says to Michael, “Sex changes things. I mean I’ve had relationships where I know a guy and then I have sex with him and then I bump into him someplace and he acts like I loaned him money.” Michael tries to reassure her. “Yeah well that’s not me, okay? I’ll call you tomorrow.”

But, caught up in the Dorothy role, and falling hard for Julie, Michael becomes another bad boyfriend. Sandy is kind of an archetype of this era; her plight could have launched a dozen singles by the Waitresses. As for Julie, she becomes a confidante for Dorothy. “There are a lot of men out there,” Julie tells her one evening. “I’m selective. I look around very carefully and when I find the one I think can give me the worst possible time, that’s when I make my move.”

During this portion of the movie, the cutting pointedly underscores Michael’s hypocrisy, cutting to a shot of Sandy sitting home alone, after she’s made dinner for Michael.

Tootsie lets Hoffman’s character off the hook pretty quickly. It builds a major plot point of Les (Charles Durning), Julie’s dad, falling hard for Dorothy. It makes the doddering actor who plays the old doctor on the show (George Gaynes) near-fatally attracted to Dorothy. And it makes Sandy into a near-stalkerish harridan — a doormat.

Watching the movie recently, I didn’t get the impression that the movie as a whole wanted to humiliate these characters. Turning them all into emotionally overinvested pests is more of a structural strategy. The characters all converge against Michael/Dorothy in order to force the characters to take radical action and perform a shocking reveal. The one that moves Jeff to observe “That is one nutty hospital.” The film’s punchline is that much stronger for the extreme reactions it draws from these characters.

For all that, Sandy’s humiliation still sticks in the craw; she’s the one character who doesn’t get the amends she deserves. (She does co-star in the realized production of Return to Love Canal but that’s so clearly not enough.) And it’s also a little much, how quickly Michael smooths things over with Julie. Maybe she still hasn’t shaken that habit of honing in on the man who’ll give her the worst possible time.

There’s a great SCTV sketch from the ’80s, a “Farm Film Celebrity Blow Up,” in which Martin Short, doing a devastating Dustin Hoffman, explains that he wants to blow up “as a woman, man.” And gender studies, and gender realities, have advanced in the intervening years to a degree that one could write a dissertation taking this movie down. And yet it remains fun, and smart — although it is ultimately smarter about acting than gender. By no small length.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny.

Where to stream Tootsie