Andrew Sarris

“Enter Jessica Lange’s Julie in a throwaway smooch in long-shot transit with Dabney Coleman’s patented male chauvinist pig. Exit Jessica Lange, but who was that blonde bombshell? Let it be recorded for the year 2022 that in the year 1982 a bedazzled reviewer for The Village Voice suddenly decided that Jessica Lange was more a knockout than Frances Farmer ever was, that she was everything Marilyn Monroe was supposed to be in Some Like It Hot, and a great deal more besides, that she lit up the screen with so much beauty and intelligence that she and Dustin Hoffman were able to transform what might have petered outinto a tired reprise of Charley’s Aunt into a thoroughly modernist, thoroughly feminist parable of emotional growth and enlightenment. It is here that Tootsie intersects Victor/Victoria most felicitously. Significanlty, the two best American movies of the year could not have been made in 1942, or even 1962.”

“What is particularly amazing about Tootsie is that every performance has fallen into place in perfect rapport with the overall conception…. I must confess that I, along with a lot of other people, was waiting for Dustin Hoffman to fall flat on his heavily rouged face. Instead, he has soared with Jessica Lange into the stratosphere of redemptive romance in a rare display of mutual enhancement….”

Andrew Sarris
Village Voice, December 21, 1982
[my copy of review is incomplete]