UNEVEN TRIO
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen UNEVEN TRIO BY ROBERT ASAHINA It's a toss-up which is more tiresome: watching the movie version of Sophie's Choice, or reading the original. William Styron's novel is more jerry-rigged...
...The action, such as it is, consists of lengthy conversations giving rise to revelations?of the causes of Nathan's erratic and increasingly violent behavior, of Stingo's doubts about his manhood and talent, and finally of Sophie's dark secret, the choice referred to in the title...
...much of the 600-page mess has been cut or compressed...
...Julie, unable to separate the sound stage and the bedroom, has a disastrous affair with Ron (Dab-ney Coleman), the director of the show, that seems like...
...At the end of the film, Michael says to Julie, "I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man...
...His one false step is a slight wobble the first time he wears high heels...
...Of course, Tootsie belongs to Hoffman, and he's in control throughout...
...They may in fact have been all these things, yet buffoons are not very worthy foes in fictionalized drama...
...He promptly lands a role in a popular soap opera and becomes an overnight star (appearing on the cover of People magazine, as Hoffman in drag has recently done in real life...
...Along the way she/he entangles herself/ himself in a couple of confusing relationships-with Julie (Jessica Lange), a fellow TV performer who rejects what she thinks are Dorothy's "lesbian" advances (though not "her" friendship), and with Julie's father, Les (Charles Durning), a widower who falls in love with Dorothy and proposes...
...To be sure, if any 20th-century figure qualifies for canonization, it's Gandhi...
...Her lisp, hesitant speech, and fluttery gestures work in her favor here, just as similarly "charming" mannerisms worked for Diane Keaton as Annie Hall...
...A down-and-out actor named Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) can't find work as a man, so he masquerades as an actress named Dorothy Michaels...
...William Styron's novel is more jerry-rigged than written, with flimsy scaffolding("AsIhavesaid...
...What was it like for his supporters to become disciples in a spiritual movement as well as followers in a political struggle...
...Talk about an actor immersed in his role...
...We learn in the book, for example, that Sophie's choice-which of her two children would accompany her into Auschwitz and which would be sent immediately to the Birkenau crematorium-was totally arbitrary...
...The pacing is brisk, the satire directed at a wide variety of targets and pitched at several levels...
...Gandhiis an old-fashioned life and times of a public figure, a sprawling cast-of-thousands spectacular spanning two continents and half a century (beginning with the Indian leader's civil rights activism in South Africa in 1893 and climaxing with his assassination in 1948...
...But instead of projecting the Mahatma's charisma, Kingsley seems to take it for granted, as do the others...
...an episode of a soap opera...
...But she is being acclaimed in part for doing what any competent actress would have to do in the role: fake a Polish accent, for instance, or withstand the pressure of facing the camera and delivering those clumsy monologues...
...Nothing in Michael's previous behavior could make us believe that such a change of heart would follow from a change of habit...
...Boring and long at 157 minutes, the film is of necessity shorter than the novel...
...The turning point of the story occurs when Dorothy insists that Ron stop calling her "Tootsie" and use her proper name...
...In the movie, however, neither the choice nor the guilt are adequately accounted for...
...A more accurate observation would be, "I was a better woman with you as a man in drag than you ever were with a man as a woman...
...It's not Hoffman's fault that the raising of Michael / Dorothy's consciousness isn't made credible in the script...
...As a result, Sophie's second choice-to commit suicide with Nathan rather than to live happily ever after with Stingo-seems capricious instead of fateful...
...The only hint that Gandhi is a human as well as a holy man is a brief confrontation he has with his wife, who is at first reluctant to abandon the advantages of her caste...
...It has humor because it's not simply a shtick, it's in keeping with Michael's preoccupation...
...All this sex and role and sex-role confusion is very funny (despite Victor/ Victoria's scooping Tootsie by several months...
...Ben Kingsley is suitably humble in the title role, but we can't figure out where he gets the determination to bring the British Empire to its knees (a shortcoming in the screenplay that no actor could overcome...
...I have to admire Attenborough's resolve in mounting the dignified, anachronistic enterprise...
...So we are spared Styron's gratuitous use of nonfictional material (Rudolf Hess' diaries, Simone Weil's and Hannah Arendt's reflections on the Holocaust) to lend his storytelling some unearned seriousness...
...What the filmmakers (and those who have praised the film) don't seem to acknowledge is that Dorothy owes her success to being no less "masculine" than Michael: She is aggressive, tough-minded , independent...
...Unfortunately, we are also denied knowledge of the characters' motivations...
...She later castigates Ron for mistreating Julie, wryly aware that as Michael he has been doing the same thing to Sandy...
...There he meets and befriends two people whose complex and tormented relationship teaches him about Life: Sophie, a Polish Catholic immigrant and Auschwitz survivor, and her lover, Nathan, a manic-depressive American Jew...
...By now, everyone already knows the story of Tootsie...
...Lange gives a surprisingly enjoyable performance in the role of long-suffering Julie...
...Most of the story takes place in flashbacks that are layered in a needlessly complicated, almost willfully obscure fashion...
...My point is that truth in history is different from truth in art...
...Streep seems mechanical, precise as clockwork and just as soulless...
...Nevertheless, I got precious little sense of the mysterious allure that Sophie has for Stingo, of the life-denying combination of remorse and despair that so attracts the life-affirming young writer...
...propping up a paperweight plot that is part Brooklyn Bildungsroman and part pseudo-philosophical tract, complete with quotations from George Steiner, of all people...
...No doubt she does these and other things as well as anyone could, given the very raw material of the script...
...they all appear toberespondingtowhat they already know about Gandhi, not to what is actually presented on the screen...
...his acting is so persuasive that I was fooled, at least while I was watching him...
...Although such a literary structure is not well-suited to film, in his writing and directing Alan Pakula has retained Styron's tedious, predictable strategy of confrontation leading to revelation and to further confrontation...
...It was only later that I realized the pleasant concoction I'd swallowed had an odd aftertaste...
...Indeed, the best parts of Tootsie have to do with that dizzying blend of "real life" and show business that is the stock in trade of actors...
...It takes a Real Man to wear a dress, the movie seems to suggest in showing women how they should behave...
...Michael plays a part to get a part...
...In the book it was easier to suspend my disbelief when the character was left to my imagination...
...I suspect she comes off well because she isn't really required to act, as she was in Frances or The Postman Always Rings Twice...
...For all the wrong reasons, Michael gets involved with Sandy (Teri Garr), an unemployed actress whom he treats miserably...
...I also have to wonder whether it was worth the time and trouble (not to mention the budget), for there is no conflict in Gandhi that could not have been conveyed better and more faithfully in a documentary...
...Problems of characterization plague Gandhi as well...
...What is worse is the handling of Gandhi himself, who seems more like a plaster saint than a genuine hero...
...Did anyone besides me notice that the real women in Tootsie, Sandy and Julie, are passive victims and caricatures of girlishness-cute, weepy, temperamental...
...Nevertheless, it is surprising how much Sydney Pollack's direction and Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal's screenplay have avoided obvious gags about, for instance, padded brassieres or high heels...
...The subtext of Tootsie is less convincing...
...In numerous awkwardly staged scenes, the principals do nothing except sit around and talk, until Sophie-in the'film it's always she, though Stingo has his share of big moments in the book-stares into the camera and launches into a monologue that fades into a flashback...
...True, there is some unsubtle physical comedy-dorothy's difficulty keeping her wig on straight, her battle with a man over a cab...
...Yet once he dons Dorothy's clothes, his/her feminist consciousness gets elevated to unbelievable heights...
...Of course, this is a conscious strategy on the part of Richard Attenborough, who produced and directed the film from John Briley's script...
...The movie ignores such questions...
...It is bad enough that the various colonial administrators, British Army officers and servants of Empire who oppose Gandhi during his long struggle for Indian independence are pictured as racists, fools, and incompetents...
...And since Dorothy is really a wolf in sheep's clothing, this is a victory for men, not women...
...Consider the moment when Michael, parading as Dorothy in underwear before a mirror, worries about the size of her "tush...
...What did it cost Gandhi to abandon his career as an Oxford-trained lawyer, to shed his suit and homburg in favor of a homespun cotton loincloth...
...Like Streep, he also gets a lot of credit for simply doing what the part requires-he looks skinny in a loincloth, grows old convincingly, captures the pronunciation of the (former) colonies...
...A first-person narrative, the book charts the coming of age of Styron's autobiographical stand-in, Stingo, an aspiring novelist from the South who settles in Flatbush during the late '40s...
...An older-but-wiser Stingo has some embarrassing remarks, too...
...Sophie's own guilt thus makes some sense in the novel, since it stems from her perverse notion of personal responsibility, her tortured Christian faith, and her familial and national heritageof anti-Semitism...
...It was forced by a German officer whose burden of culpability made him desire to "inflict upon Sophie, or someone like her-some tender and perishable Christian-a totally unpardonable sin...
...He has become so serious about being Dorothy that his worries have become hers-the nagging concerns of an aging, slightly vain actress...
...she merely has to be herself...
...That's no mean feat, given that he must play Michael, Michael as Dorothy, and Dorothy as soap opera heroine...
...Meryl Streep has received a great deal of praise for her portrayal of Sophie...
Vol. 66 • January 1983 • No. 2
