August 11, 1987 | There’s no punctuation mark at the end of the title — Who’s That Girl — and that’s appropriate. Because the title isn’t a query, just a simple statement of fact: Madonna is that girl who’s the driving force behind this screwball farce. The comedy is a well-tuned star vehicle, and Madonna, the peroxided punk sprite of pop music, revs it up for a wild ride.
Who’s That Girl is the third major film to showcase Madonna’s slick shtick, a brazenly entertaining routine that’s equal parts Marilyn Monroe, Betty Boop and Jean Hagen. Previously, she soared mischievously through Desperately Seeking Susan (she was Susan, a hardboiled gamin), then sank disastrously in Shanghai Surprise (opposite her husband, Sean Penn). With Who’s That Girl, she returns to her earlier state of streetwise grace, starring as Nikki Finn, a feisty little cupcake with the all the brass of a hash-house waitress staring down at a nickel tip.
Things don’t begin very promisingly, for Nikki or the movie. There’s an unmistakably desperate edge to the overplaying as the basic premise is set up. Loudon Trott (Griffin Dunne), is a button-down Manhattan tax lawyer who’s engaged to his boss’ daughter (Haviland Morris). On the day before the big wedding, Loudon’s autocratic future father-in-law (John McMartin) gives him a strange task: escort a young woman from prison, where she’s been serving four years for manslaughter, to a nearby bus station. Naturally, the young woman is Nikki. Just as naturally, she doesn’t want to board the bus.
Things pick up as soon as Nikki joins Loudon in a borrowed Rolls Royce, and cajoles the lawyer into a few frantic detours. Nikki is a vision of recidivist chic, decked out in black leather jacket, mesh stockings, miniskirt and bright red lipstick. But she insists she’s a good girl at heart — or, at least, not a murderess. Sure, she liked the guy whose body was found in the trunk of her car — “But not enough to kill him.” She wants to clear her name by finding evidence that will implicate the real killers. But Loudon, rudely rattled out of his upscale security, is ill-prepared for the gun dealers, car strippers and low-rent hit men they encounter. “Just tell me the truth,” he implores Nikki during a particularly perilous adventure. “I won’t be upset, I just want to know — are you The Antichrist?”
Griffin Dunne delivers this line, among others, with the superb timing of the first-rate farceur that he is. Madonna is the star of Who’s That Girl, but he’s hardly her stooge. Indeed, it’s not stretching things too far to say he’s playing a yuppie Cary Grant to her thrift-shop Katharine Hepburn — a point driven home by the appearance of an exotic cougar, a baby for Madonna to bring up. The big cat gets lots of laughs, too.
Unlike a lot of recent comedies, Who’s That Girl actually gets funnier as it rolls along, as though scriptwriters Andrew Smith and Ken Finkleman grew continually more surreal and self-assured the longer they remained at their typewriters. There’s a dumb running gag about the indiscriminate sexual appetite of Loudon’s fiancée, a woman with a weakness for cabdrivers. But there are more amusing touches and oddball grace notes provided by Sir John Mills as a wealthy eccentric fond of endangered species; Robert Swan and Drew Pillsbury as a squabbling team of buddy-buddy cops; and Coati Mundi (lead singer for Kid Creole and the Coconuts) and Dennis Burkley as exceedingly inefficient hit men.
Director James Foley — whose earlier films, Reckless and At Close Range, were not exactly laugh riots — steadily escalates the chaos, breezily building to a climactic wedding sequence that brims with inspired nuttiness. But even when things get most frantic, Madonna maintains her sassy sang-froid. Nothing fazes her Nikki, not even Loudon’s indignant ranting when she shoplifts a gold cigarette lighter from Cartier’s. The lighter, she patiently explains, is merely a lure to keep customers from stealing more expensive merchandise, like diamonds. “This,” she says, brandishing the stolen item, “is what you call in business a loss leader.”
Neither Loudon nor anyone else in Who’s That Girl can argue with logic like that.
