Working Girl (1988) – Review by Pauline Kael

The first ten minutes of Mike Nichols’ Working Girl is laid in very deftly, preparing us for a bouncy, updated version of the Cinderella comedies that Ginger Rogers made in the thirties between her musicals with Fred Astaire. Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith), a poor but enterprising girl from Staten Island, fights off the sleazoid bosses and struggles to break through the educational-background barriers and climb from Wall Street secretary to executive. But the Cinderella feeling must all still be in Nichols’ head; the emotion has been relegated to an idea, and a rather grim idea, at that. We’re supposed to be cheered by watching Tess become part of the establishment: she makes it into the world of mergers and acquisitions. Her victory is certified when she’s ensconced in a cubicle high up in a skyscraper; on the soundtrack, Carly Simon and a women’s choir sing exultantly. No, there’s no irony—only fatuity.

Lest we get the wrong idea, the picture makes it clear that the victory is only for a sweet, feminine girl like Tess—not for anybody forceful or butch. The villain is Tess’s sneaky, upper-crust boss, played by Sigourney Weaver: she doesn’t just try to steal Tess’s big, career-making radio-network idea; she’s also unwomanly. At first, Weaver is a confident, entertaining cartoon of moneyed egomania; she’s a genuinely game actress, eager to be funny. But then the picture demeans her, by making her a ludicrous witch who can’t hang on to her guy or her job. (It even demeans her in small, gross ways: when she’s in the hospital, doctors try to look under her nightie.) Weaver looks stranded in the last part of the movie. The director seems to have abdicated, and the staging is so broad you can’t tell whether satire is intended or just dumb jokes; even with sharp editing, nothing has any edge.

Is this really the work of the Mike Nichols who is said to be a miracle man with actors? Tall, skinny-legged Melanie Griffith is warm and, yes, down to earth and very appealing, and she has funny bits all the way through. She carries what there is of the picture. But her funky (and infinitely preferable) performances in De Palma’s Body Double and Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild are the skeletons rattling in this picture’s closet. The subtext of Working Girl is that Mike Nichols is trying to let a little bit of tackiness into a big-budget movie—a little bit of John Waters and Something Wild. It must have been the funky Melanie that this picture with its double-entendre title was meant to be about. But Nichols may be afraid of swinging the door open, and so Melanie Griffith is ostensibly used for “vulnerability.” This is the kind of star performance in which the heroine’s misty eyes and soft-focus smiles are supposed to turn our brains to jelly. Since Tess keeps beating her head against a wall trying to succeed, it wouldn’t be inappropriate for her to look bleary and depressed. But the moviemakers try to conceal Griffith’s being out of condition. The camera goes lyrical; it babies her, making her a cuddlebug, and showing us her firm, round haunches while pretending it isn’t doing what it’s doing. (One of the things it’s doing is catching her in black garter belts, push-up bra, and bikini panties; there’s even a peeky porno tease when she bustles about cleaning Weaver’s house while wearing undies.) As the investment-banker hero, Harrison Ford tries for the casualness of a big-time smoothie, and he has some style, but, whether because of what he’s attempting or because of the director’s listlessness, the film’s pacing slackens just when he appears. Ford does manage to be diverting in moments that have nothing to do with the tinny plot: a scene where Tess has passed out and he makes small talk in her direction, and, later, a scene when he gets a food delivery at the door and goes back to Tess in bed, whistling “If I Only Had a Brain.” (He suggests a man who keeps himself amused.)

The picture does better by some of the players in minor roles: Joan Cusack (of the euphoric grin) as Tess’s happy, rowdy best friend; Kevin Spacey as a coke-snorting arbitrageur who’s an irrepressible lech; and Nora Dunn as the office suckup and priss. But Nichols must have a cummerbund around his head: the directing is constricted—there’s no visual inventiveness or spontaneity. And in his hands the script (by Kevin Wade) has no conviction: the lines have a lot of surprise, but the situations (and digressions) are moldy. After Tess gives up her tattooed Staten Island boyfriend (Alec Baldwin), she returns and has more scenes with him—as if the tattoos hadn’t already told us everything. When Tess and her investment man get overheated by a deal they’ve got going, and rush from a business meeting to their big sex scene, the movie pokes only the mildest fun at them. The plot hinges on Tess’s making an impression on a fatherly tycoon (Philip Bosco), who materializes out of an earlier era of movies; this dear old geezer sees that justice is meted out to everyone. Yet the way the wedding of the tycoon’s daughter is set up suggests that he lives among twerps and has spawned a bumpkin. There’s a classic piece of inept plotting: the last-minute introduction of a disk jockey who’s the linchpin of the network deal. It’s as if somebody ran onto the stage waving a telegram just as the curtain came down on his head.

This Cinderella story seems to have been concocted by people at the top of the skyscraper who have no fellow-feeling for losers. The film makes the point that Tess, like the other working-class secretaries, tries to get attention and does exactly the wrong thing: she puts on so much makeup she looks like a brainless bimbo, and then she wonders why the Ivy League graduates get jobs over her. The secretaries wear their hair scooped up high in front and hanging down around their shoulders, and it’s all teased and whipped and snarled. Another director might have shown us how pretty they are in their purple and green and blue eyeshadow and dishevelled Marie-Antoinette hairdos, but Nichols has them looking like procuresses. The discrimination against them should be by the blind Ivy League bosses; here it’s by the blind director.