The Talkies/Fairly Funny
Bawer, Bruce
THE TALKIES FAIRLY FUNNY by Bruce Bawer Working Girl is the archetypal eighties comedy. It's cast entirely with bankable names (Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford, Sigourney Weaver); it's so glossily...
...And investigate he does, with remarkable fatuity and incompetence...
...Not that there's anything wrong, necessarily, with a film that sets out to amuse 12-year-olds...
...But Tess isn't simply getting back at Katharine—she's putting at risk the reputation of the company that employs her, not to mention the entire career of her unwitting and innocent partner in the deal, with whom she is supposedly smitten...
...She's up against a host of Ivy Leaguers —most of them men—who speak correctly, dress properly, and have the Right Look...
...Nonetheless she is appropriately endearing, for the most part (although she fails to make Tess's penchant for the occasional vulgar insult seem anything but ugly), and carries out with aplomb her character's metamorphosis into a graceful swan...
...These logical inconsistencies aside,Working Girl—written by Kevin Wade and directed by Mike Nichols—is admittedly a very slick contrivance, in the best and worst senses of the phrase, its plot as neatly worked out as it is improbable...
...Short answer: Harry is Inspector Clouseau, of the Pink Panther films, without a script, a director, or an accent...
...The makers of the Pink Panther films recognized this...
...Or, of course, without the late Peter Sellers to give him that certain je ne sais quoi—although it must be said that John Candy, the heavyweight star of this featherweight comedy, has his own special something...
...Long answer: he's a bumbling oaf of a private investigator, "the last in a long line of great detectives," who has been 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989 exiled by the successful, upscale family agency, Crumb and Crumb, to an extremely seedy branch office in Tulsa, Oklahoma...
...when one of her superiors does her wrong, she abuses him—before the entire company —on the electronic tickertape...
...It's when Katharine fractures her leg on the slopes, and is hospitalized in ski country for a week or so, that Tess does something—well, spunky: she covertly steals her investment idea back and, pretending to be something more than a - secretary, joins forces with Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford), a first-class, fast-lane deal-maker at another brokerage firm...
...the upper-middle-class types in the executive suites are almost entirely rotten...
...It doesn't help that she's utterly without tact...
...And he captures the residents of these communities too: one of the film's most memorable images is the sight of Joan Cusack—in the role of Tess's best friend —wearing matching orange-and-blue earrings and eyeshadow...
...Part of what's funny about Clouseau is that even in his most ridiculous moments he doesn't know he's ridiculous...
...Nor do they have a very clear bead on their principal character...
...The leading cast is a mixed bag...
...A t any rate, in order to pull off this breathtaking coup behind Katharine's back, Tess must effect a major transformation in herself—and who else to use as a model but Katharine herself...
...This is a role that the young Katharine Hepburn would've sunk her teeth into, and Weaver does it proud...
...Things look hopeless, however...
...And who proves also to be a great deal less of a blessing than Tess had thought, because when Tess comes up with an investment idea for a client, Katharine doesn't hesitate to rip it.off...
...The film's uncertainty of tone is disastrous: indeed, a couple of scenes involving a listless, cross-eyed, heavy-lidded butler are so unfunny, and feel so out-of-place, that they have a positively surreal effect...
...But then, the whole supporting cast gives the impression that it's killing time waiting for a better movie to come along...
...Other viewers, however, may well leave the theater feeling undernourished...
...For instance: Candy, at the wheel of a speeding car whose brakes have been cut, pulls out a book entitled Emergency Driving Made Fag...
...The only problem with Tess's life (aside from the fact that her boyfriend is a creep) is that her home, wardrobe, and neighborhood are pretty tacky—but that's not even a problem, really, because she doesn't know they're tacky...
...o's Harry Crumb...
...hates show business...
...it has a distracting Top-40-type score (by Carly Simon) that doesn't really suit the picture at all...
...Sometimes Candy and company appear to be going for this quality with Harry Crumb, and sometimes they don't...
...it's so glossily produced that you sometimes feel as if it would be much, much funnier if only it didn't look so expensive...
...For even in Candy's funniest moments, the wit of Blake Edwards's Pink Panther movies is sorely lacking...
...At the beginning of the movie, Harry gets the call that he's obviously been awaiting years, summoning him to the agency's L.A...
...Yet it is Weaver who lingers longest in the mind...
...Nichols and Wade apparently want to have it both ways...
...Like all the other white-trash secretaries who ride the ferry to work every morning, she lives in a dumpy apartment and has a going-nowhere, good-for-nothing, macho-dumbbell boyfriend (Alec Baldwin...
...What's more, the film's class values seem rather confused, to say the least...
...Candy, at the racetrack in a jockey outfit, gets stuck in a tiny phone booth labled "Jockeys Only...
...Candy, spying on a kidnapping suspect from inside an apartment building ventilating system, ends up being propelled through the labyrinthine ducts at breakneck speed when the suspect sets the air-conditioning on exhaust...
...That something, unfortunately, does not include a talent for choosing scripts...
...Neither Harry Crumb's director, Paul Flaherty, nor its screenwriters, Robert Conte and Peter Martin Wortmann, seem to know when enough is enough...
...We're expected to feel that Tess is justified in her subterfuge because Katharine has betrayed her...
...Finally, the screenwriters' gift for amusing dialogue is virtually nil: this is, alas, yet another of those eighties comedies in which the typical snappy comeback is "Says you...
...headquarters to investigate a crime—a kidnapping, to be specific...
...the makers of Harry Crumb don't...
...To them, Tess is nothing more than a sex object...
...They apparently think it is sufficient, for their comedic purposes, to have Harry sayand do one blatantly stupid thing after another...
...What gives...
...Her character, Katharine, may be a devil, but she's got a lot more style and poise than most heroines in American movies nowadays, and Weaver plays her with great verve...
...In partnership with him, she proceeds, within a matter of days, to negotiate a multimillion-dollar acquisitions deal for a major corporation...
...Not surprisingly, her spunkiness gets her fired...
...Griffith possesses the sort of annoying, monotonous voice that a couple of generations ago would have kept an actress from becoming a movie star (and with good reason...
...Here's the story: Griffith plays Tess McGill, a tacky-dressing, gum-chewing, English-language-fracturing 30year-old white-trash secretary who resides in working-class Staten Island and works at a brokerage firm on Wall Street...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989 39...
...He has a self-possession, a sense of dignity, that makes his bumbling all the more hilarious...
...At her new job she finds Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer herself with, thank heaven, a woman boss—the beautiful and sophisticated Katharine (Sigourney Weaver), who proves to be a year younger than she is...
...but when you get the feeling that the script was written by a couple of 12-year-olds, you've got trouble...
...But the question remains: Are we supposed to laugh condescendingly at these people or identify with them...
...By her own standards, then, Tess's life doesn't seem to be missing anything important...
...But even within the framework of sheer farce there are rules about credibility and consistency of character...
...it's funny enough, and even sort of touching at times, though there's not a thing about it that you haven't seen a hundred times before...
...Candy, to dramatize a point, slams his hands palms downward on a desk, thereby impaling himself on a dozen or so fishhooks...
...Yet she wants nothing more than to escape from the world she knows and to move up into the world of these Ivy League snobs whom she despises—and we're supposed to cheer for her...
...Consider this: in the tried-and-true tradition of Hollywood moviemaking, Tess and her lower-middle-class girlfriends are (without apparent exception) good and decent folks...
...And while you'll probably leave the theater feeling entertained, you'll know that there's not much about the picture that will stick in your mind a week later...
...Through all these episodes, Candy mugs it up more than adequately, and for those in search of an utterly uncerebral entertainment, the half-dozen or so sequences of this sort are probably worth the price of admission (as prices of admission go these days...
...It's weird: this young lady whose lower-middle-class look and voice and carriage have kept her from joining the ranks of the Masters of the Universe managessomehow to turn herself overnight into a replica of the cool, elegant Katharine...
...Why is this transformation suddenly so easy for her to carry off, and why in heaven's name hasn't it occurred to her—or hasn't she been able—to do it before...
...Needless to say, in true-to-formula fashion, Tess and this hunky wheeler-dealer fall quickly in love—for he's not like all the other big-time Wall Street operators, you see: he hates networking, hates talking about money, hates the whole downtown crowd...
...it has a glamorous setting, and a getto-the-top-of-the-heap plot, and a love interest, and a gratuitous sex scene or two...
...Sure—and Sammy Davis, Jr...
...But there's one thing that separates her from the other white-trash secretaries: she's brainy...
...It's not the most sophisticated kind of humor, but it does make you laugh...
...This patron, for one, left Harry Crumb with a newfound appreciation of Edwards's ability to build a sight gag, his sense of timing, and his avoidance of overkill...
...Over the past few years, she's earned her MBA in night school, and she's determined to move up in the firm...
...Granted, there's a lot of funny stuff in this picture, virtually all of it slapstick...
...As is usual in a film of this sort, the fat cats are rather too broadly played, but Nichols does capture nicely the atmosphere of those gray, Pennsylvania-steel-town-like working-class communities that line the northern tier of Staten Island...
...We're supposed to like her for this: she's not stuffy like these other Wall Street types, she's spunky...
...Ford, meanwhile, in the role of the driven-yet-decent mover-and-shaker who is also Tess's love interest (and who, incidentally, embodies a contradiction or two of his own), exudes the requisite middle-aged-boyish charm and energy...
...If Harry Crumb nonetheless provides quite a few laughs, it is thanks mostly to Candy's native drollery, winsomeness, and vivacity...
...And while we're busy asking questions, what species of morality is operating here...
Vol. 22 • April 1989 • No. 4
