December 21, 1988 | Working Girl is a clever, class-conscious fairy tale, directed with clockwork precision and razor-sharp insight by Mike Nichols (The Graduate, Silkwood). Much like the recently released Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, a film it resembles in no other way, it is a witty and sophisticated entertainment in a style that might best be described as Hollywood Neo-Classical.
Melanie Griffith is the heroine of the piece, Tess McGill, an ambitious Wall Street drone who wants to raise herself out of the secretarial pool. (It’s a part that, in another age, Judy Holliday could have played.) Griffith has been very good before, from her sultry debut in Night Moves (1974) to her antic comic turn in Something Wild (1986), but this is her star-making role. She makes the most of it, and the movie makes the most of her.
Perhaps the highest compliment you can pay Griffith is, even though her co-stars are the extremely formidable Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver, she remains the focus of attention in every scene that she appears. That’s even more impressive when you consider that she is in almost every scene, tracing Tess’ trajectory up the corporate ladder, without ever wearing out her welcome.
In the merrily contrived script by playwright Kevin Wade (Key Exchange), Tess is a plucky night school graduate who wants to prove herself worthy of competing with Harvard alumni on the Wall Street playing field. Unfortunately, Tess lacks the right background, the right ZIP code — she lives in a working-class Staten Island neighborhood — and even the right ”serious” hair. Her clothes, her eyeshadow, and even her ”New Yawk” style of speech are all wrong for a world where style often counts for more than ability.
Trouble is, after she starts dressing and speaking for success in Manhattan, Tess risks alienating the folks back in the old neighborhood. When she shows up in her pert businesswoman’s attire, her blue-collar boyfriend, Mick (Alec Baldwin), takes one look at her and says: ”Did you have to go to traffic court or something?” Cyn (Joan Cusack), her best friend, is scarcely more supportive: ”Sometimes I sing and dance around the house in my underwear,” she tells Tess. ”But that don’t make me Madonna!”
Still, Tess presses on, eager to emulate her new boss, Katharine Parker (Weaver), a hard-charging wheeler-dealer in mergers and acquisitions. Katharine is the sort of super-confident corporate type who strides through offices like slumming royalty. She says she wants to treat Tess as an equal — a collaborator, even — and Tess, bless her guileless little heart, believes her. So it comes as a bitter disappointment when, while Katharine is conveniently inconvenienced with a broken leg at a ski resort, Tess learns Katharine has stolen Tess’ idea for a radio network acquisition.
It’s a rude awakening, but it teaches Tess an important lesson: All is fair in love, war and corporate climbing. So, while Katharine is off recuperating, Tess slips into her boss lady’s office, Upper East Side apartment, and wardrobe closet.
Boldly, Tess tries to sell her acquisition idea to corporate heavyweight Oren Trask (Philip Bosco). Fortuitously, Tess gains an ally, and a lover, when she casts an alluring eye at Jack Trainer (Ford), an investment broker. Predictably, Tess’ high-stakes hoax is unveiled at an awkward moment by an enraged Katharine — who, not incidentally, is planning a personal merger with Jack. But if you think this leads to an unhappy ending, you don’t know much about fairy tales, class-conscious or otherwise.
Working Girl takes more than a few pages from All About Eve and The Secret of My Success. But the filmmakers have embellished the borrowed elements with their own semi-cynical humor and seriocomic observations. This is a story about sexual and corporate politics, and the in-fighting is amusing as well as revealing. A nice touch: Jack often seems just as vulnerable as Tess, especially when he admits he is an overgrown whiz kid whose slumping career desperately needs a boost.
Melanie Griffith winningly plays Tess as equal parts dreamy gamin and driven go-getter, soft when she wants to be and steely when she has to be. Her unaffectedly sensual quality as a screen presence serves the character well, but never gets in the way of her making Tess an intelligent individual who deserves respect. When she says, ”I have a mind for business, and a body for sin,” you fully believe her on both counts.
As Jack, Harrison Ford gets a rare chance to express hearty goofiness and fainthearted insecurity, along with flashes of his familiar naughty-boy charm. It’s his most thoroughly engaging work on screen since Witness. Sigourney Weaver enjoys an even more drastic change of pace as Katharine, and she is gloriously, ravishingly wicked. Mind you, she has a few moments where she hints that it’s all a big mistake, that Katharine really isn’t so bad after all. But don’t be fooled: Katharine has the self-assured ruthlessness of a shark in a pool of minnows. Weaver plays it for laughs, but we know Katharine is playing for keeps.
The supporting cast is flawless. Alec Baldwin and Joan Cusack are robustly working class without tipping over into caricature. Better still, they are very funny. In fact, even Cusack’s hair is hilarious: Her mercilessly teased coiffure looks like a melancholy bird of prey perched atop her skull.
Philip Bosco deserves special mention for his earthy yet magisterial air as Oren Trask, a corporate giant who, apparently, has not yet been able to buy good taste. (His daughter’s conspicuously expensive wedding reception is a laugh riot of Caribbean motifs.) Maybe it’s Oren’s lack of highfalutin airs that makes him receptive to Tess’ up-from-working-class spunk. Or maybe he’s just the Fairy Godfather for this Wall Street-wise Cinderella.
Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, production designer Patrizia Von Brandenstein and costume designer Ann Roth give Working Girl all the slickness it needs, and then some. It’s a little surprising, maybe even disappointing, to note the lack of a stronger satirical edge in a film directed by Mike Nichols. But, then again, perhaps anything short of complete approval for Tess’ fast-track rise would be out of place in a fairy tale told from her point of view.
