Mrs. Doubtfire came out when I was 11, and it was, I believe, my first experience seeing Robin Williams in a live-action film. And I thought it was hilarious. But a lot of the humor, naturally, came from the fact that a middle-aged man was dressing up as an old lady.
Is it still okay for a firm supporter of trans rights, someone who has a trans dad and several friends, to laugh at Mrs. Doubtfire? Does it hold up in 2021?
I think that a lot of the humor comes just from the fact that Robin Williams is disguised as a completely different person, regardless of that person’s gender.
If any part of the premise hasn’t aged well, I’d say it’s not that Robin Williams is disguised as a woman - it’s that he’s using deception and disguise AT ALL in order to get close to the children.
Nah. a 60+ year old British guy as the nanny would have not been funny at all.
Indeed. Sally Fields’ character is awful. She drops the kids off late & shows up an hour early to pick them up, stays in the gorgeous house in SF while he has to make do in a shitty apartment, then uses his shitty apartment as an excuse to deny him any rights, trashes him in front of the kids, etc.
Then at the end, as she freely admits - she requests the judge to remove all his custody rights and treat him as an abusive father because “she was angry”.
(Yeah, watching the movie as a newly divorced father is a very different experience…)
I’d like to know what goober in that film thought it was appropriate, in 1993, to depict a cartoon bird smoking a cigarette. Robin Williams was right to quit his job, and could have sued the pants off that entire studio.
Yeah, I hadn’t seen it since it was first on cable in the 1990s until a few months ago, and I was struck by just how unredeemingly bad Sally Field’s character was.
I suspect she had to be that awful so that even in that era, the whole drag subterfuge would seem almost acceptable. Had she been not so odious, Williams’ character would have looked like some combination of insane, creepy, and sneaky.
Most of the humor was really fish-out-of-water sort of stuff, with the “water” being normal male gender stuff. It wasn’t really transgender related or cross-dressing related, except in the very most superficial way.
And the whole bit with the smoking bird was pretty much a topical sort of thing for that era; 1993-ish was right around the times that most restaurants and workplaces were starting to implement no-smoking workplaces and/or eliminating smoking areas, etc… These days it seems insane, but I’d be willing to bet that whole scene was something of a stand on that social issue.
Sued them for what? His job was to voice the script for the cartoon. He refused. He was threatened with firing if he continued to refuse, so he quit. Refusal to do your primary job duty (as long as it’s not illegal) is about as clear and legally defensible grounds for termination that there is.
A few years before Mrs Doubtfire came out, ongoing controversy over their mascot, Joe Camel, finally led to Camel cigarettes retiring the character from advertising. The character, a cartoon camel, was widely perceived as an attempt to create a kid friendly mascot, with the goal of enticing children to take up smoking. This was a character that never (AFAIK) appeared in any media directly targeting children, but was still dropped by the company because it was widely perceived to be encouraging children to smoke.
The scene in Mrs. Doubtfire may have been inspired by that controversy, but there’s really no way anyone making a contemporary (at the time) animated children’s feature would have an extended scene of a character smoking a cigarette like that. It would have been a massive, show-ending controversy. I remember seeing the scene at the time, and thinking it was a jarring and heavy-handed way of establishing Williams’ character as a “good guy.”
On the other hand, it feels like a lot story lines from the early 90s that boil down to “working mom = bad”.
I don’t know. There was that scene where she told Mrs. Doubtfire things like “If I got home early to be with them, something would go wrong. The house would be wrecked and I’d have to clean it up. He never knew, but so many nights I just cried myself to sleep.”
I think it’s a reasonable take that Robin Williams was the primary reason the marriage failed, but Sally FIeld was the primary reason the divorce failed.
Unless he sat on his balls.
I was actually thinking of the Joe Camel stuff when I wrote my post, and the fact that a lot of restaurants ditched the smoking sections in the early 2000s, etc… That was kind of the point in history when smoking shifted from ok to socially unacceptable, so it wasn’t surprising to see that in films right around then as well.
But yeah, it was definitely trying to cast him as a “good guy” I agree.
Oh, sure, it’s just the way they did it rang false. They picked a specific battle that had long since been won. It would have worked if Williams was writing copy for print ads, and objected to them introducing a new cartoon mascot, but drafting print ads doesn’t give Robin Williams a chance to do funny voices.
It was far from a subtle movie; pretty much everything in there was over the top.
I think this was a great comedy, zany yet intelligent (like many comedies of the late 80s/early 90s), and that we could use more comedies like that nowadays. IMHO, Robin Williams’ character pretending to be an old lady has no relation to the trans rights movement whatsoever. He was a cis man passing as a cis woman for purposes completely removed from gender and sexuality. There was the scene when his son catches him urinating standing up while otherwise in costume and assumes he’s a male assailant, and I could see how someone would read ignorance of trans people into that; however, context is everything. The point was, up until then, his son knew Mrs. Doubtfire to be a typical, presumably cis old lady, and suddenly something very suspicious that would appear (and rightly) to dispel that has occurred.
Again, context is everything. He did not disguise himself to be a predator in any sense of the word, but to be able to spend time with his children, with whom his wife was trying to limit contact. He was a fun and permissive father, but he was not a complete loose cannon. When I saw that film at the time, I saw what he was doing as an empowering thing (in particular for the kids as they should have the right to spend time with both parents). In his shoes, I would have done the same.
I did not think it was funny then, and do not think it is funny now, so I’m no judge of how that has changed. But what I did think, and do think, was it was running the same joke as ‘Some Like it Hot’, and wasn’t in any way as ‘new’ and ‘transgressive’ as it was reported to be at the time.
I think that the cross-dressing joke was successful in Shakespeare, and SLiH, and MrsD, and will be successful again. Society has changed a lot between Shakespeare and now, but some jokes never grow old. They just need to be rested.
I’m just here to put in a plug for the novel on which the movie is based, by Anne Fine. (The thread doesn’t specify book or film, so I hope you don’t mind my posting this.)
It’s set in Britain, not the USA, and is a much darker portrayal of two dysfunctional divorced parents, but also quite funny. The movie was fine as a movie, but very much a vehicle for the zany Robin Williams, and true-ish to the general plot of the book while not very faithful to the spirit. I think the British context matters, because there’s a long, long tradition of comedic cross-dressing, but also a few very public celebrities (Lily Savage or Mrs Brown) played by male actors. I think the crude point-and-laugh-at-the-gender-transgression is still at the root of it, but it’s nevertheless a very different phenomenon in Britain vs America.
Last I looked, it was out of print, which is a real shame. I re-read it every now and again.
IMHO Tootsie holds up better. I’ve always preferred Dustin Hoffman’s acting over Robin Williams.
Tootsie is better written and I find the character redemption more interesting.
I don’t believe either movie makes fun of Trans people. The characters are cross dressing to achieve a specific goal. Tootsie is trying to get employment as an actor and Doubtfire wants to be with his estranged family.
It didn’t hold up from the start. Too broad and the final setpiece – where he’s trying to be the two alter egos in the restaurant – is Ritz Brothers level mugging
The only thing that holds up at all is the Chuck Jones animated section because Chuck Jones.
{Looks up Ritz Brothers}
But some of us were 12 or 13 when the movie came out, not 40 or 50.
I see movies my teenage daughter watches which have recycled jokes or premises from the early 90’s, but it’s still the first time she’s seen them.