The Associate

The Associate

A low-energy recycling of the “Tootsie” formula, “The Associate” commits the fatal error of mostly keeping its Tootsie-figure offscreen and making him unlovable when on. Can Whoopi Goldberg play a white man? Sort of; he looks like a bad Madame Tussaud’s experiment. Does she make him into someone we care about? Not even.

Goldberg stars as Laurel, a smart businesswoman who keeps getting passed over because she’s not male, so she invents an imaginary male partner and gives him all her best ideas. That partner, cutely dubbed “Cutty,” soon becomes the most famous investment adviser on Wall Street but he’s never around; he’s always out of town or on vacation while Laurel fronts for him.

Eventually, though, people have to see Cutty; so Laurel enlists the help of a friend who is a celebrity impersonator and begins appearing at public events as a white man. But not an interesting or likable one. What made us root for Tootsie was Tootsie her moxie, her personality, her spirit. It wasn’t the cross-dressing gimmick that made that movie work.

On its way to an awkwardly plotted third act, “The Associate” does score some solid points about men running everything in business. We see Laurel training the guy (Tim Daly) who gets promoted over her. We see Daly taking clients to strip clubs then closing deals at 3 in the morning after having sent Laurel home alone earlier in the evening. We see her quit in disgust and open her own firm. And we like her relationship with her new secretary (Dianne Wiest), another smart woman lost in male power world.

We’re even somewhat charmed by elements of the con-plotting here: Goldberg cycling stock tips through nonexistent “Cutty,” fooling everybody, including veteran investors. But eventually the monster she’s created gets out of control (“Even when I create the perfect man, he ends up stabbing me in the back”). And Laurel has to create a “real” Cutty in order to retake command.

Dustin Hoffman famously tested and despaired for weeks before finding Tootsie’s look. Robin Williams, as Mrs. Doubtfire, wasn’t as good as Hoffman but got away with it. Goldberg’s Mr. Cutty is just latex and makeup weird-looking; maybe she wanted to play a white man just to prove she could, but if she’d made Cutty a black man, she might’ve done something more interesting and possibly even looked more believable at same time.

Even that wouldn’t have saved this movie; it has a lot of heart between Wiest and Goldberg and some other characters, but most of its plot is mechanical some sitcommy stuff (Goldberg dressed like a dude), some slapsticky stuff (Goldberg falling down a lot), some mistaken-identity stuff (people think Goldberg is white guy). Plus weirdness like women trying to seduce Mr. Cutty while we suspect they’d be whispering in his ear about good dermatologists if this were real life.

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