Year of Release: 1988
Director: Mike Nichols
Starring: Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford, Sigourney Weaver, Joan Cusack, Alex Baldwin, Philip Bosco, Olympia Dukakis, Oliver Platt, Kevin Spacey, Nora Dunn, James Lally, Amy Aquino, Jeffrey Nordling
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Score out of ten (whole numbers only): 7
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Synopsis and Review
By the time "Working Girl" premiered at the end of December of 1988, just in time for awards consideration, Mike Nichols was coming off a mild hit with "Biloxi Blues", and a big disappointment, "Heartburn", with his beloved Meryl Streep, which didn't connect with audiences. As it turns out "Working Girl" was a huge hit, sending Melanie Griffith on an upward trajectory which resulted in a series of misfires, whereas Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver further cemented their taste level. The film focuses on the story of Tess McGill, an assistant for two stockbrokers in a Manhattan firm, who has dreams and aspirations of being able to work with portfolios of assets as opposed to taking phone calls and doing coffee errands. Despite having a business degree earned from attending evening classes, Tess isn't taken seriously. Her bosses send her on what she thinks to be a networking opportunity only to find out that it's more of a inappropriate hook up situation. After turning the tables on them, she finds herself out of a job, and the job placement office warns her the opportunity available is actually her last (at least with them). As it turns out it's another administrative assistant role, but this time around for a woman named Katherine Parker, a beautiful, patrician, and elegant individual who is handling mergers and acquisitions. While Katherine is condescending, the women manage to establish a working relationship. Tess comes up with a business idea/angle to Katherine who reassures her she'll review it and give her feedback, so Tess can enroll in a program she wants to pursue. In the meantime Katherine goes on a break, has a skiing accident, and turns to Tess to do all chores at her house (while keeping everything afloat at work). While checking Katherine's house and attending to her instructions, Tess accidentally discovers Katherine has decided to move ahead with her business idea, claiming it as her own, without telling her these developments. Tired of being mistreated (including a philandering fiancée), Tess decides to let her ambition be her driver.
"Working Girl" hit the mark when it premiered in 1988. It represented a different level of professional visibility in the workforce for women, and it came on the heels of Charles Shyer's "Baby Boom" which had also hinted at that reality, though that story went in a very different direction, which was not the case for Kevin Wade's script. "Working Girl" managed to place a female character at the center of the narrative, and much like Charlie Sheen's Bud Fox in Oliver Stone's "Wall Street", Tess was resourceful, intelligent, and ambitious, though unlike Sheen's character not entirely unscrupulous. Even though her actions weren't exactly the most honest ones, she was not taking ownership for anyone's intellectual capacity or ideas, nor was she leveraging any insider trading to get ahead: she just wanted to get a fair shot at being able to pitch her ideas, and be judged on those, and not on her background, or where she hailed from. While this description may come across as a recipe for a potent drama, Kevin Wade and Mike Nichols were able to create a funny observational comedy, mostly leveraging the fish out of water angle, and particularly by relying on both Sigourney Weaver and Joan Cusack to do the heavy lifting in terms of injecting humor during the narrative. Katherine Parker is the perfect satire for the boss who has gotten to where she is because of a combination of nepotism, the right connections, and her looks. She isn't necessarily obtuse, but she has no issues walking over others to self promote and get where she wants to be. She is the right amount of self involved and narcissistic to elicit comedic observations from her cocktail reception, to her ski trip, to her final confrontation with Tess and Jack. Joan Cusack on the other hand had far less screen time, but was able to perfectly capture the Staten Island persona, with the big hair and mild ambitions, who wanted to be a good friend, and just lead a quiet, suburban life. The film is indeed a testament to how society was evolving in the late 1980s, and how these characters, particularly Tess, is more than just a traditional one note central heroine. She does feel slighted, deceived, but she's willing to combat and shape her life to get where she wants to be (without losing sight of herself). The cast is uniformly excellent, with Melanie Griffith having her second best moment yet on film (her best is still Audrey/Lulu in Jonathan Demme's "Something Wild"), with solid support from Harrison Ford, and the aforementioned Sigourney Weaver who ends up stealing most scenes she's in, the same going for Joan Cusack. The production team is brilliant, including the late Michael Ballhaus' cinematography, Carly Simon's score, and Ann Roth's costumes. A classic always worth revisiting.
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