10/25/96
MOVIE REVIEW: The Associate
Goldberg practices her masculine wiles

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

***1/2 (out of five)
Starring Whoopi Goldberg, Dianne Wiest, Eli Wallach, Tim Daly, Bebe Neuwirth, Austin Pendleton, Lainie Kazan, George Martin. A Hollywood Pictures release written by Nick Thiel from the motion picture L'Associe and the book El Socio, directed by Donald Petrie. Rated PG-13, contains profanity, brief nudity, adult themes. Running time: 114 minutes.

Dustin Hoffman dressed in drag to play a female soap opera star in Tootsie.

Robin Williams was a dowdy but kindly Englishwoman in Mrs. Doubtfire.

So why not Whoopi Goldberg as a middle-aged white man in a business suit in The Associate?

In this Wall Street comedy, Goldberg plays a savvy stock analyst who finds that the only way she can be taken seriously by the male-dominated financial traders is by inventing a male boss -- and then discovering to her horror that she must produce him as evidence.

The Associate is bright and cheerful and has an especially good back-and-forth repartee between two best-supporting-actress Oscar winners -- Goldberg and Dianne Wiest as her extraordinarily efficient secretary-alter ego. Bad-a-bing, bad-a-boom! Move over, First Wives Club.

And so I barely minded that what should be the brightest centerpiece of the movie -- the moment Goldberg's Laurel Ayres wanders out into the world as a man -- seems a rehash of things we've seen before. Laurel's inevitable unmasking is a treat that's eagerly anticipated the moment we see her in her get-up as Robert S. Cutty, who looks slightly embalmed. That scene is played for all it's worth, and it certainly brings laughs, even if they have the ring of deja vu.

But The Associate is a lot more than a black woman in white drag; really only a small part of the plot, although certainly the one that's bound to be talked about most.

The script by Nick Thiel (White Fang), based on the French film L'Associe, which was based on the novel El Socio, really is up to pointedly exploring the glass ceiling that many women in business experience, and poking fun at the good-ole-boy network that excludes women and members of minority groups.

Finding that she has been passed over for a well-deserved promotion by her cutthroat partner at a big Wall Street firm (played by Tim Daly, who is on TV's Wings and formerly of Trinity Rep), Laurel leaves to start her own firm.

Unfortunately, she quickly discovers that -- although it's never said -- potential clients don't want to do business with a woman, especially one who's brighter than they.

Laurel, desperate and in danger of losing the apartment house that her father left to her, decides to invent a male partner, figuring that that's what her prospective clients really want.

He's brainy and brilliant, and his stock choices are winners. Soon the fictitious Robert S. Cutty becomes the toast of Wall Street and a media darling who is quoted endlessly, even though no one has actually laid eyes on him.

Things, of course, begin to get out of hand as Laurel's clients begin to demand to meet the mysterous Cutty, who forever seems to be in Bangkok on business. Someone even tells Laurel that she'd be nothing without Cutty, which is, of course, just the opposite of the truth.

The Associate is pretty darned funny in a slick sort of way and it's well played by Goldberg and Wiest, the latter as the secretary who knows where all the bodies are buried . . . except for Cutty's.

As they climb the Wall Street ladder together in a rather delicious camaraderie, the film bubbles. It's best when they're cooking up some new scheme to dazzle Wall Street and put one over on the media. Here the emphasis is on fun and Goldberg shines, as she did in Sister Act, in pretending to be someone she isn't. Wiest comes across as clever and smart and quick, even if she's always wearing floppy hats that make her tiny squinched-up face look like a mushroom.

However, The Associate could have used a little snappier pacing from director Donald Petrie (Grumpy Old Men, Mystic Pizza) that would have added more screwball to what essentially is a screwball comedy. At times the film gets a bit too caught up in the mechanics of a stock deal involving a computer software company that's not always easy to follow. A sequence in which the girls try to eliminate the increasingly problematical Cutty by murdering him should play more outrageously than it does.

Still, there are a lot of laughs and some nice supporting touches by Bebe Neuwirth as a pretty and smart woman who too often decides to put her faith in sex, George Martin (another Trinity alumnus) as a blustery broker, Austin Pendleton as a software genius on the run, Lainie Kazan as a pushy columnist and Eli Wallach as a big investor who holds the key to Laurel's success.