Critics reviews

In a movie rich with zingers (the great Elaine May, uncredited, played a large role in shaping the screenplay), Garr has the best, this exit line from a party: “I had a lot of fun. Do you have any Seconal?”

Hoffman's self-consciousness, which can grow wearying in films like Rain Man, is a gift here. He's always letting his work show in Tootsie, and that's the point: One's forever aware of the high-wire that Dustin/Michael/Dorothy's walking, and there are moments where you swear you can almost see the shape of Hoffman's eyes change within a single frame as one role gives way to the other.

Tootsie is a marvel of big-studio moviemaking from an era when such a thing was no longer considered possible. It went through multiple writers and producers even before it landed at Columbia Pictures. Once it did, in 1980, the company that had made some of the best golden age comedies funded and developed it with a moxie that had mostly vanished from the majors when movies ceded ground to television and studios got sucked into conglomerates.

With most of the humor predicated on homosexual panic, this Dustin Hoffman drag comedy plays like the reactionary inverse of Blake Edwards's Victor/Victoria: it's a film about sex roles that upholds and solidifies strict polarities, styled as safe situation comedy rather than Edwards's rousing, vulgar farce.