A film
review by Roger Ebert, December 21, 1988.
The
problem with working your way up the ladder of life is that sometimes you can’t
get there from here. People look at you and make a judgment call, and then, try
as you might, you’re only spinning your wheels.
That’s how
Tess McGill feels in the opening scenes of Working
Girl. She is intelligent and aggressive, and she has a lot of good ideas
about how to make money in the big leagues of high finance. But she is a
secretary. A secretary with too much hair. A secretary who rides the Staten
Island ferry to work. A secretary who started talking like a little girl when
she was 11 because it was cute, and is still talking the same way, except now
she is 30. There is no way anybody is ever going to take her seriously.
One day
Tess (Melanie Griffith) gets a new
job and a new boss in the mergers and acquisitions department of a Wall Street
firm. The boss (Sigourney Weaver) is
a woman of almost exactly Tess’s age, but with a different set of accessories.
For example, she talks in a low, modulated voice, and wears more businesslike clothes,
and has serious hair. If you want to get
ahead in business, Tess muses, you’ve
got to have serious hair. Tess gets along fine with her boss until the boss
goes on a skiing holiday and breaks her leg and is supposed to be in traction
for six weeks. Then Tess accidentally sees a file in her boss’s computer and
finds that the boss was about to steal one of Tess’s brilliant suggestions and
claim it as her own.
This makes
her fighting mad, and so she begins an elaborate deception in which she
masquerades as an executive at the firm, and figures out a way to meet a guy
named Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford),
who is the right guy at another firm to make the deal happen. She meets Trainer
at a party and gets drunk and ends up in bed with him, even though she
explained to him, I have a head for
business and a body for sin. Will he ever take her seriously now? Yes, it
turns out, because he likes her, and because he thinks her idea really is
pretty brilliant.
That’s the
setup for Working Girl, the new Mike Nichols film, which is one of
those entertainments where you laugh a lot along the way, and then you end up
on the edge of your seat at the end.
Structurally,
the film has some parallels with The
Graduate, Nichols’ 1967 classic - including a climactic scene where an
important ceremony is interrupted by the wrong person bursting in through the door.
But Working Girl is the other side of
the coin. The Graduate was about a
young man who did not want to make money in plastics. Working Girl is about a young woman who very definitely wants to
make money in mergers.
This is
Melanie Griffith’s movie in the same way The
Graduate belonged to Dustin Hoffman. She was not an obvious casting choice,
but she is the right one. And in an odd way, her two most famous previous
roles, in Body Double and Something Wild, work for her. Because we
may remember her from those sex-drenched roles, there is a way in which both
Griffith and her character are both trying to get respectable - to assimilate everything
that goes along with serious hair.
Supporting roles are crucial in movies like this. Weaver’s role is a thankless
one - she plays the pill who gets humiliated at the end - and yet it is an
interesting assignment for an actor with Weaver’s imagination. From her first
frame on the screen, she has to say all the right things while subtly
suggesting that she may not mean any of them.
If she is
subtle, so is Ford, an actor whose steadiness goes along with a sort of
ruminating passion. When he’s in love with a woman, he doesn’t grab her; he
just seems to ponder her a lot. Weaver and Ford provide the indispensable frame
within which the Griffith character can be seen to change.
The plot
of Working Girl is put together like
clockwork. It carries you along while you’re watching it, but reconstruct it
later and you’ll see the craftsmanship. Kevin
Wade’s screenplay is sort of underhanded in the way it diverts us with
laughs, and with a melodramatic subplot involving Griffith’s former boyfriend (Alec Baldwin), while all the time it’s
winding up for the suspenseful climax.
By the
time we get to the last scenes, the movie plays like a thriller, and that’s all
the more effective because we weren’t exactly bracing for that. Working Girl is Nichols returning to the
top of his form, and Griffith finding hers. [Ebert’s rating: **** out of 4
stars]
Blogger’s
comment: Sigourney Weaver's character, Katharine Parker, is definitely a sociopath. She's all about control and winning, and she is willing to lie, cheat and steal while feeling no guilt, shame or remorse. And when she's finally caught, she plays the helpless woman. Classic! There's also excellent supporting role work by Joan
Cusack as Tess’s best friend Cyn, and Philip
Bosco as CEO Oren Trask. And Carly Simon's iconic Let the River Run, is heard frequently throughout the film.
Labels: comedy,
drama, romance
