Ill-Informed Gadfly

“Working Girl” is a glorious romantic comedy that effortlessly evokes the triumphs of the screwball era, with its assertive heroine, workplace setting and celebration of artful dissembling. Yet it also endures as a document of its time and place, late-80s Manhattan. If it’s not Mike Nichols’s best movie, I haven’t seen a better one — yes, including “The Graduate.” Like nearly all his movies, “Working Girl” takes place in an idealized world, but it’s consistently idealized. He envisions corporate mergers and acquisitions as an arena where hard work and ingenuity are rewarded and where no one stops to question the value of helping the rich get richer. Released in 1988, at the dawn of the multinational-corporation era, “Working Girl” makes the creation of a conglomerate look breathlessly exciting. In the world of this movie, big business is the place to be — everyone else is a clock-punching sucker. Even Mick (Alec Baldwin), the provincial cad who gets dumped, deservingly, by the heroine, Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith), ultimately impresses with his entrepreneurial acumen.

Mick and Tess shack up on Staten Island, and the movie strongly implies that they were born and raised there. Tess, however, dreams of the steel-and-glass towers across Upper New York Bay, and her yearning fuels the stirring helicopter shot that opens the movie — a vertiginous whirl around the head of the Statue of Liberty, then a dip into the water before a pan up to the skyscrapers of the financial district. The vista is complete only when we see the tops of those beautiful, boxy twin towers. (Evocative use of those buildings will make me choke up every time. I first visited New York when I was 7 or 8, a few years before the release of “Working Girl.” Approaching by car from New Jersey, they dominated the skyline and symbolized the promise of otherworldly delight that this frustrated urbanite, who grew up in a small town in Virginia, will always associate with Manhattan.) The city’s grandeur established, the camera veers back toward the harbor and zeroes in on a window of the Staten Island Ferry, the only transit link between the “forgotten borough” and the rest of the city. On the soundtrack, you may think at first that you’re hearing a standard, if accomplished, synth-driven and percussion-heavy 80s score, but actually it’s the beginning of a lush and catchy song by Carly Simon, “Let the River Run.” Simon dubs New York “the new Jerusalem.” We are following pilgrims to the Holy Land of high finance.

Nichols lays the groundwork for the entire movie in that one shot. And the rest never disappoints; there’s hardly a wasted scene or line of dialogue. (Kevin Wade wrote the screenplay, his first and best; he’s now the showrunner of the “Sex and the City” knockoff “Cashmere Mafia.”) Tess and best friend Cyn (Joan Cusack) ride the ferry together, and Cyn gives Tess a cupcake with three candles to mark her 30th birthday. They talk about their plans for the day; Tess is squeezing in classes on her lunchbreak and after work. She’s a secretary at a brokerage — an eminently practical one who schleps to the office in tennis shoes before changing into high heels at her desk. She knows her stuff but is frustrated by the menial tasks everyone expects her to do — like grabbing an extra roll of toilet paper for the men’s room after she barges in with an important call for her boss that she could have handled herself, if only the client were willing to hear the truth from a secretary.

Tess has a night-school business degree, but with her humble background, she can’t elbow her way into a management training program. Humiliated by her boss (Oliver Platt), who tries to set her up with a coke-snorting hedonist at another firm (Kevin Spacey), Tess takes clever revenge and quits, and is placed by her job counselor (Olympia Dukakis) in a new position. (It’s hard to imagine more impressive casting of three small roles in a 10-minute span.) This time, Tess’s boss is a woman her age, the sublimely assured Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), who appears to be exactly the sort of mentor Tess needs, albeit one with the same preening sense of entitlement as her male counterparts.

Griffith is third-billed, behind Harrison Ford and Weaver, but remarkably, Ford doesn’t appear until 35 minutes in, and at that point Griffith owns the movie. Like Nichols, if she’s ever done better work, I haven’t seen it, although she’s awfully good in Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild” (1986) as well. She nails Tess’s restlessness and frustration, her ingenuity, her mix of self-assuredness and self-doubt. Watch the pirouette she does when Tess, posing as an executive, is asked if she wants any coffee, and she reflexively gets up to fetch it herself. Griffith’s breathy, girlish voice has often been a liability, but she uses it brilliantly here, modulating her speech depending on whom she’s addressing. As a secretary, Tess maintains the broad vowels and nasal aggressiveness of her native dialect; as a would-be executive, she softens and enunciates. (One of Tess’s classes is a speech class; Cyn asks, “Whaddaya need speech class for? You tawk fine!” Funny, but Cusack is from Chicago, not Staten Island, and she sounds like some unholy blend of the two. Cusack parlayed the big laugh lines and the even bigger hair into an an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, but I think it’s maybe the 10th- or 12-best performance in the movie. Weaver also got a Supporting nod, and deservedly so; Katharine oozes competence and avarice.)

Soon after she goes to work for Katharine, Tess comes to her with an idea to get a technology firm to buy a radio station. Katharine is intrigued but later says the deal won’t fly. But after she breaks her leg skiing (the accident, Nichols being Nichols, is the most poorly executed shot in the movie), Tess discovers that Katherine plans to pursue the proposed merger behind her back. Charged with taking care of Katherine’s apartment and managing her affairs, Tess essentially becomes Katherine and schemes to take the deal herself to Jack Trainer (Ford), a merger maven at another firm.

I wasn’t prepared for how good Ford is in this movie. I’m serious: It may be his best performance. He embodies Jack with grace and sensitivity; you see his intellect come alive. Like Tess, Jack is frustrated by the business world, but for entirely different reasons. Ford makes him a sensualist, a man of outsize appetites. Watch how quickly he downs every drink he gets his hands on; he’s always in a hurry, but he’s also dying to cut loose. Even in a suit and tie, Ford remains a man of action, and he finds things to do physically that illuminate Jack’s state of mind. Dashing, smart and well-connected, Jack appears to have it all, but he’s clearly nagged by insecurities. He’s harried, unsettled. Jack and Tess meet at a party, and she passes out after mixing Valium (at Cyn’s suggestion) with tequila (at Jack’s). As Jack carries Tess up a long flight of stairs to his apartment, Ford delivers a slyly funny monologue about how he doesn’t know how clean it will be inside, because the cleaning lady keeps changing days, and other guests “have remarked on it.” Later, after an all-nighter in his office, he unbuttons his white Oxford shirt, tosses it, puts on a brand-new one and splashes his underarms with water, all the while keeping the phone pressed to his ear. His coworkers applaud. I wanted to as well. When Jack reveals that he’s in “a bit of a slump” at work, he’s wolfing down souvlaki, and the bit of yogurt sauce on the side of his mouth accentuates his vulnerability.

Still, Jack is a smoothie, and he knows it, and Ford brings his signature rakish charm. He tries to ask Tess out as they walk to an elevator, but she resists, offering a halfhearted, “You know, maybe I just don’t like you.” As the elevator doors close, he responds: “Me? Naaah.” That moment encapsulates what I love about “Working Girl.” (The movie’s not an old favorite or anything; I had never seen it before. I watched it once, and then, two days later, watched it again.)

Occasionally, Wade’s screenplay gets overemphatic, as when Katherine explicitly compares the prospect of marriage to a merger. But nothing drags this movie down — it’s so sturdy, so well-timed. The end of Tess’s relationship with Mick could be a burdensome distraction, but it’s not, because Baldwin (who became a star by appearing in five movies in 1988) is too good to let Mick slip into caricature. And the last act speeds along with astonishing energy and wit, leading up to a final shot that mirrors the first but replaces yearning with satisfaction. For me, few mainstream movies offer such deep and lasting pleasures as “Working Girl.”