The Big Reveal

Never work with an Oscar winner shorter than the statue.--Larry Gelbart

Ah, but thank goodness Larry did, or he wouldn't have given me my purest comedy moment.

It wasn't just him, of course. Half the WGA is rumored to have worked on Tootsie--Gelbart, Elaine May and Barry Levinson among them. And Sydney Pollack, a director with a previously undetected sense of humor (the laughs of Random Hearts and Harrison Ford's stud earring came later), kept the pacing crisp and the camera jumping for the gag, as Pauline Kael put it. Add to that a phenomenal supporting ensemble--Jessica Lange, Teri Garr, Dabney Coleman, Charles Durning, George Gaynes, Doris Belack, Bill Murray, Geena Davis, and Pollack himself--each actor at the top of his or her game. And last but not least, Dustin Hoffman himself, in one of the most astonishing magic acts of his career, playing essentially three characters: Michael Dorsey, boorish unemployed actor; Dorothy Michaels, charismatic soap-opera star; and Emily Kimberly, popular character on the soap whom Michael-as-Dorothy portrays.

Nothing against Judd Apatow's freewheeling, semi-improvised, eye-of-the-hurricane style, but Tootsie is the greatest modern showcase of the strengths of classical comedy structure. The transformation of Michael Dorsey into Dorothy Michaels, laboriously set-up and overexplained if had been made today, is streamlined through a funny, no-frills jumpcut early on. (The more implausible the scenario, the better it is to get through it quickly.) Jokes are set up in the first half of the film that pay off in the second. And the tension that tightens inexorably around Michael's keeping his secret identity as Dorothy comes to a catharisis in an ingenious moment of revelation.

The moment comes when the soap that Michael is on (and by this point, desperate to leave) is forced to shoot a major scene on live television--a dinner party in Emily Kimberly's honor--and he seizes the opportunity to break from his scripted lines and improvise his way to revealing Dorothy's true identity.

EMILY KIMBERLY: Well, I cannot tell you all how deeply moved I am. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that I would be the object of so much genuine affection. It makes it all the more difficult for me to say what I'm now going to say. Yes. I do feel it's time to set the record straight. You see, I didn't come here just as an administrator, Dr. Brewster; I came to this hospital to settle an old score.

The beauty of Michael's solution is that he reveals himself in character, by giving Emily a secret which, however absurd, works within the tradition of soap opera conventions. What makes it even funnier is that he hasn't thought it through in advance and so has to fumble his way forward, to the horror of cast and crew.

EMILY KIMBERLY: Now you all know that my father was a brilliant man; he built this hospital. What you don't know is that to his family, he was an unmerciful tyrant - a absolute dodo bird.

RON CARLISLE: (the show's director, played by Dabney Coleman, in the booth) Oh, no. Not live!

"Emily" continues with her tale, which develops into a convoluted backstory: how her father drove her mother to drink before she died in a tragic drunken horseback riding accident; how her parents had two children, a reclusive son named Edward and a daughter who got pregnant at fifteen, fled into exile, and raised the girl as her sister before dying of a hideous disease; how the girl's daughter came to work at the hospital, where she was despised for being a do-gooder.

EMILY KIMBERLY: But she was deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply loved by her brother. It was this brother who, on the day of her death, swore to the good Lord above that he would follow in her footsteps, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, just, just, just, just, just--

RITA MARSHALL: (the show's producer, played by Doris Belack, also in the booth) Now don't don't don't don't panic....

EMILY KIMBERLY: --just, just, just, just, just owe it all up to her. But on her terms!

RON CARLISLE: Oh, God, here come the terms.

By now the audience with which I first saw Tootsie on its initial release was laughing so hard you couldn't hear half the lines. And, the fact that I was only twelve years old, I didn't really understand everything that was happening either. But no matter: I laughed my ass off anyway. I crack up every time I see it. It's my favorite comic moment in a movie.

At this point I will stop transcribing the scene and let you enjoy the rest of it yourself. Only note how each character has a distinct reaction to Dorothy's big reveal, how all of them are given their moment. Finally, I should add that the scene below cuts off before Julie's (Jessica Lange's) moment. I always hated William Goldman's dismissal in one of his books of Lange's performance. Far from a "little cameo," she creates the most genuine human being in the movie. She gives Tootsie its sweet embrace--but not before a slug to the stomach.

To the Last Drop

Pity that Stanley Kubrick didn't live long enough to adapt Urinetown for the screen--the Master of the Bathroom Scene would have had a field day with the subject matter and its ultimately pessimistic, satirical edge. Such is life, I did catch my local university's stage version, and it holds up to a high standard of quality. Other recent productions--Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (helmed by guest director Vincent Dowling) and Stoppard's Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead--were wonderfully performed and imaginatively staged in our small interior theater-in-the-round, but both clocked in at just under three hours, a long time to be sitting in a squeaky chair. Urinetown, is, at approximately two hours, a swiftly paced account of a power struggle between the pees and the pee-nots in a town facing a twenty-year drought. (The former force the latter to pay to use regulated toilets.) While not particularly memorable, the musical numbers are lively and funny; and while not particularly deep, the characterization of the "revolutionaries" who attempt to overthrow the Draconian rule of the proprietors of the town's water supply is pretty biting. I'm a sucker for the kind of vaudeville humor in the scenes within archvillain Caldwell B. Cladwell's office. And I choked out a laugh during the final scene, when a dying-of-thirst old lady begs for a glass of water and the delusionally idealistic female protagonist smiles sweetly and replies, "There's a glass of water in your heart."

Delayed Gratification

I decided not to see American Gangster even before the tepid reviews, when I read that Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe wouldn't be sharing any scenes together until the end, thereby continuing a trend in current cinema that annoys the hell out of me. If the Golden Age often paired movie stars together and affording us the pleasure of watching them butt heads for a couple hours (Bette & Joan! Bela and Boris!), many of today's movies keep their actors apart as long as possible, following the Sleepless in Seattle formula even when they're not Ephronian crap.

Excluding the Ocean's movies--which dilute the star pool by mashing a bunch of them together--the last time I can recall a film featuring two actors performing at the level of Washington and Crowe's game was Michael Mann's Heat (1995) starring Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro right before both started coasting on their estimable career laurels. There was a great deal of anticipation leading up to the movie's release followed by something of a letdown, with much carping aimed toward the fact that Pacino's homicide detective and DeNiro's bank robber shared only one major scene together. (More on that momentarily.) Watching Heat again the other night, I think the film holds up better now than it did then, its longuers fleshing out a whole panorama of characters and linking the two principals for the considerable amount of screen time that they're apart. I'm mixed about Mann's body of work, his style at times seeming to overcompensate for a lack of substance. But while Heat is in some ways his ultimate exploration of machismo, this is levened by the best ensemble of women he's ever had. Amy Brenneman and Ashley Judd make vivid impressions as, respectively, the love interests of DeNiro and Val Kilmer's criminals, both showing the level of denial needed to stay with them (or the loyalty to let them go). And playing what could have been a stereotypical suffering wife of a cop, Diane Venona holds her own against Pacino (who gives one of his over-the-top performances, though I think mostly in character). Refusing to fade into the background, she may be the strongest onscreen partner he's ever had.

As for The Scene itself, it is no small measure of Mann's perversity that when he finally gets the legendary Godfather alumns together, about halfway into the film, it is over a cup of coffee. What's more, he shoots it over the shoulders of his actors, so that Pacino and DeNiro never actually share the same frame. (This has prompted rumors that they weren't even together on the day of the shooting, but the DVD's Special Features prove otherwise.) I would have been irked too if the sequence weren't so fascinating, with the pair subtly mimicking each other's body language, discussing bad dreams, and quietly vowing to take the other down. I'm not quite sure how, but Mann gets away with it. It's a great scene in a fine movie, weaving together the parallel paths of these two men and setting up the tragic grandeur of the climax that is to come.

Kiss Kiss Zhang Zhang

After Hero and House of Flying Daggers, you'd think that Zhang Yimou would have had his fill of the kind of martial-arts spectacle that enjoyed a renaissance of one with Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon a few years back, but he tries to up the ante to D.W. Griffith levels of excess with Curse of the Golden Flower. I thought Hero was lavish but emotionally distant, and I loved Flying Daggers until the seventeenth plot twist too many, which utterly negated everything that had been set up before. Still smarting from that betrayal, I should have been able to identify more than I did with Chow Yun-Fat's cuckolded emperor in Golden Flower, who becomes embroiled in a bloody familial squabble that makes King Lear look like The Family Stone. Some made fun of Ang Lee's wire-work in Crouching Tiger, but I'll take that any day over the thudding sensory overload that Yimou achieves here. (David Chute's review in L.A. Weekly nailed it when he stated that the movie feels oddly like a dry run for Yimou's next project--the 2008 Opening and Closing Ceromonies in Beijing.) There's not much to be invested in when a director capable of erotic power (in Raise the Red Lantern and parts of both Shanghai Triad and Flying Daggers) shows less interest in great camera subjects like Yun-Fat and Gong Li than in his CGI armies and oversaturated colors and assassins soaring through the air. I wish I could raise my arms in rapture over Curse of the Golden Flower but sadly the film placed third in its bid for my attention, behind a good book I'm reading and my cat devising a flanking maneuver toward a bowl of ice cream that would have put Rommel to shame.

Little Big Apple

Never having been to New York, I happily glean what I know of the city through movies, books and television shows. (Yes, I suppose I could read a magazine, but durn it, that wouldn't save time.) Admittedly, a culture critic unfamiliar with Sinatra's kind of town carries probably all the clout of an Opus Dei member who's never toured Rome. Moreover, just as East Coasters often appear to view middle America through the lenses of Alexander Payne (we're fat and ignorant), the Coen Brothers (we're rubes with funny accents), and David Lynch (we like apple pie and we dream about dwarves), I am aware that my overreliance on artistic mediums can leave me suspect to stereotypes and biases. So let's get on with them, shall we?

New York is provincial.
Based on novels like The Brooklyn Follies, New York City seems less a sprawling metropolis than a series of petty fiefdoms. At the start of the novel, the titular borough is where the narrator, Nathan--insurance salesman, ex-husband, screw-up extraordinaire--explains that he moved to in order to die; by the end, he has survived familial dysfunction, a rare books scam, and medical maladies just in time for 9/11. If the abrupt intrusion of a real tragedy feels unearned, that is partly because the author, Paul Auster, writes in coy prose, employing a literary device--Nathan crafting a work called "The Book of Human Folly"--that would have made Erasmus gag. A more significant reason is the implausibility of its characters. Auster wants to pull off what Richard Russo accomplishes on a regular basis: to depict the lives of flawed people with good hearts and big dreams. But oddly enough, the only character who rings true is his most florid creation, a flamboyant book dealer named Harry Brightman, whose tragic end is the novel's most moving moment. The blurbs speak muchly about Auster's warmth and compassion; but the fact that the only sequence outside New York--in North Carolina, where Nathan goes to retrieve his estranged niece from the arms of a bible-thumping nutcase (natch)--views the outside world in unequivocably negative terms tells you all you need to know about the provincialism of the author's worldview.

New York is insular.
Made three decades before Auster's book, Manhattan is, of course, Woody Allen's cinematic mash note to the city that he loves--which, if I understand him correctly, is overrun with pretentious intellectuals with voracious sexual appetites. I saw the film for the first time in its entirety only a few weeks ago on TCM, and I was struck how Allen's snarky satire is contrasted, even heightened by the lush romanticism of Gordan Willis's cinematography and Gershwin's music. For me, the key storyline in the movie involves Allen's teenage girlfriend wanting to study abroad in England. Even more than Auster, Woody Allen fears the outside world. But the Allen of Manhattan, at least, was in on his own joke about the insularity of his existence. He understands, and perhaps even envies, why particularly for a young person with her whole life ahead of her, the world outside would be enticing.

New York leads the world (when it's not behind it).
Mad Men, my favorite post-Deadwood TV series, is set in an even earlier New York City. It is the year 1960, and the show's ensemble, comprised of employees at a Madison Avenue advertising agency, are blithely unaware of the momentous changes in store for them and their country. Much of the dramatic tension derives from the entitled conservative outlook of the patriarchy of the Sterling Cooper agency (who support Nixon and Big Tobacco) and the more visionary thinking of a few of the younger characters. As a friend pointed out, while the costumes and lighting uncannily recreate the mood of the period, the tone is not nostalgic. Critics have pressed charges of inaccuracy about the time period as well as the atmosphere of the city in the early 60s. (I'm reminded of the hostile reviews that greeted Eyes Wide Shut, which seemed to complain that the film wasn't a documentary about the high-society orgy set.) I think that Mad Men, like any good dramatization, is focused more on the authenticity of its story than its backdrop. Interestingly, though, it shows a city at once on the pulse of the nation (its ads, after all, tell us what to buy and how to think) yet in danger of falling out of step with the rhythm of the times.

New York brings the funny.
And no TV show is currently funnier than 30 Rock. Since the series began, Tina Fey has had tremendous fun with her New York milieu and last week's episode--featuring Carrie Fisher as Liz Lemon's idol, a has-been, socially-conscious comedy writer who takes a recently fired Liz back to her dive apartment to begin anew ("Never go with a hippie to a second location," Alec Baldwin's NBC executive hilariously advised)--was no exception. But the show's best episode to date, last season's joyous "Cleveland," depicted the world outside New York's skyscrapers not to be feared, but as a benevolent wonderland. (Baldwin again: "We'd all like to flee to the Cleve.") Like Seinfeld, 30 Rock's sense of humor manages to be a product of a distinct New York sensibility yet completely universal. It is perhaps fitting that among the many works of art set in the Big Apple, a sitcom aiming to be nothing more than funny would be the most generous and inclusive of all.

Eavesdropping

In The Lives of Others (which I finally saw for a second time, now on DVD), Ulrich Muhe is reminiscent of Ben Kingsley at his unblinkingly spookiest. As Hauptmann Wiesler, a 1980s-era East German Stasi officer with an array of talents ranging from surveillance to 48-hour interrogations, Muhe's performance is largely silent, relying on a series of reaction shots that function almost as plot-markers that chart his character's arc from predatory party-liner to subversive sympathizer.

This transformation occurs when Wiesler is ordered to spy on Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), a successful playwright and his actress girlfriend Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), and it's hard to pinpoint the precise moment of change. Like a sonata that functions both metaphorically and as a plot device throughout the film (and Gabriel Yared's music is indispensible), The Lives of Others builds organically, with the motivations of its characters compiling like musical notes--some ultimately discordant, others merging in unexpected harmony. Suffice to say that both Wiesler and Dreymann take action against the G.D.R. only after the figure-heads of the State start meddling with their lives. Although the characters never formally meet, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck is adroit enough of a writer-director to convey, through both words and images, how the destines of the two become permanently entwined.

There is much that I love about The Lives of Others, which blends the best qualities of European cinema with an Americanized accessibilty (and features a scene in an archives that the SAA should use as a public relations tool on the importance of professional record-keepers). Yet for all of von Donnersmarck's skill, I could see on a second viewing that the movie absolutely would not work with the wrong actor--a scenery-chewer like Kingsley would have pushed his effects too hard instead of receding into the background as Muhe does, letting us gradually warm to him. I respect Scott Foundas's willingness to write an almost lone-dissenting review, but I don't see how he can accuse a movie of claiming that the Stasi were "just following orders" when the turns of the plot derive so clearly from the personal motives of its characters. Any film, much less one set at the last pinnacle of the Cold War, that is about the transformative power of art (in music, through the stage, on the page)--that believes bad people capable of good deeds--runs the risk of appearing cloying or unconvincingly sentimental. But through that fixed stare, right up to his deeply generous final scene, Muhe makes you believe.

Belly Flop

Being a huge fan of the casino-musical genre, I'm deeply sorry that I hadn't even heard of the new television series Viva Laughlin until after its abrupt cancellation this week. I did track down a brief clip of Hugh Jackman's big number, as it were, karaoke-ing to "Sympathy for the Devil" just to get an idea of what all the critical caterwauling was about. Yes indeedy, it sucks; but amid your hearty chuckling consider this: How rare is it these days, with test-audience filters and media slavishness and polished production values and spin from the actor-publicist-studio axis and millions-in-marketing campaigns, for a show with a completely lunatic concept to slip unfettered through the cracks of mediocrity? So rare that I understand the eagerness of the Ken Levines and Alan Sepinwalls to pounce like jackals on Hugh et al, but at the least let's give the poor bastards credit for trying. And failing. Miserably.

To put it more formally: A toast, to unmitigated disasters.