Working Girl

Caught up in a fast-paced sleazy biased combustion, unafraid to bite back but running out of options, a creative, imaginative, brave cutting edge ingenue, moves forward with bold reckoning, to wildly make definitive things happen (Melanie Griffith as Tess McGill).

Her new boss (Sigourney Weaver as Katharine Parker) breaks her leg skiing so she's tasked with managing her affairs, and while taking care of this and that, discovers one of her ideas was stolen.

Since her boss is immobile and was likely going to pass her work off as her own, she decides to pursue it herself, improvising in nondescript motion.

Daringly poised on the boundless shifty breach, she accidentally makes first contact, and he's as enamoured as he is intrigued (Harrison Ford as Jack Trainer).

But she can't let him know she's technically not an executive, and can't believe her bad luck when she finds out whom he's dating.

Back home her steady beau has thoughtlessly found someone else (Alec Baldwin as Mick Dugan), and her plucky best friend (Joan Cusack as Cyn) wonders if she's gone too far.

But this is her chance and she's set on success, and her idea's a good one, even if she struggles ill-composed.

Unaccustomed to high flying competitive hostility, she still elegantly disarrays.

The results are mixed if not edgy inasmuch as Working Girl invokes sentimental style.

Since Tess is uncertain, as she applies the knowledge she's learned in school, without professional backing, it makes sense that the film should be a little bit wobbly, somewhat disjointed, like a working form in contextual motion.

As she becomes more sure of herself, Griffith and Ford piece together some convincing scenes, and the ending's sure and steady, as it soothes the latent aftershocks.

It's a sympathetic tumultuous testament to feminine strength, which sincerely values Tess's trials, and sincerely sways their sombre projection.

She's tough, and doesn't put up with nonsense, even though she's clearly dug in deep, and lacks a wide ranging social network, and has betrayed the only person who would hire her.

But even if the film's disjointed pulse aptly reflects genuine attempts to define oneself, some of the scenes still fall a bit flat, without enigmatically enriching the staccato.

There's one where Tess stands alone at night surrounded by mist for instance, that would have seemed much more classical if it hadn't been so sentimentally hewn (a number of solid scenes that don't fit well together at times coalescing in the end, is different from several solid scenes added to some melodramatic downers that don't fit well together at times stitched together in the end).

Mike Nichol's has made many great films but he's a bit off in this one.

It would have been stronger if Tess's boss had been a man.

And Griffith had received top billing.

It's still a solid examination of willful resolve struggling under realistic hardships.

With many endearing scenes.

Where the actors work so well together.