‘Sometimes I sing and dance around the house in my underwear. Doesn’t make me Madonna. Never will...’
Where to start with Working Girl? It’s a curious hodge-podge of liberal progressiveness, needless objectification of its female cast and a snapshot of ’80s attitudes towards women in the workplace and the perception of yuppies more generally. That it comes from Mike Nichols (The Graduate, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) adds an extra layer of intrigue…
Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith) is an ambitious and determined career woman who will stop at nothing to get ahead. When she is coupled with girl boss Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), Tess is given the opportunity to push a deal through with company head Jack Trainer (Harrison Ford). Elsewhere, Tess struggles to keep her relationship with Mick (Alec Baldwin) afloat in the face of a burgeoning relationship with her new business partner. Joan Cusack, Oliver Platt and Kevin Spacey round out the starry cast. The latter plays a coke-addled sexual abuser. Ladies and gentlemen… the 1980s!
Whilst being yuppie nightmare adjacent, Working Girl is not a thriller. Here, the interloper is the protagonist rather than the villain and Nichols has no real interest in thrills and spills. Instead, he allows Griffith to gently seduce the audience until it’s impossible not to root for her. Ford is charming and Weaver suitably ruthless but Nichols understands that this is Griffith’s movie and he centres her even in the face of the bona fide movie stars that are flanking her.
Working Girl is horribly dated in some ways but it remains a satisfying and dynamic fable of one woman’s struggle to get ahead in a cutthroat world. Nichols smuggles in a comment on the class system in America through the Trojan horse of a romantic comedy. It works.