Hoffman stars as Michael Dorsey, a character maybe not unlike Hoffman himself in his younger days. Michael is a New York actor, bright, aggressive, talented - and unemployable. 'You mean nobody in New York wants to hire me?' he asks his agent, incredulously. 'I'd go farther than that, Michael,' his agent says. 'Nobody in Hollywood wants to hire you, either.'
Michael has a bad reputation for taking stands, throwing tantrums, and interpreting roles differently than the director. How to get work? He goes with a friend (Teri Garr) to an audition for a soap opera. The character is a middle-age woman hospital administrator. When his friend doesn't get the job, Michael goes home, thinks, decides to dare, and dresses up in drag and goes to an audition himself. And, improvising brilliantly, he gets the role.
'Tsotsi' Review In a shantytown of Soweto Township on the edges of Johannesburg, South Africa, Tsotsi (Presley Chweneyagae) lives and breathes by the fear he instills in others. Tsotsi, literally translated meaning 'thug' in his South African ghetto dialect, is a 19-year-old who was orphaned at an early age. Last year's Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film, TSOTSI is a brutal, affecting film about a young man's turn from violence to almost incomprehensible generosity. Gavin Hood's film takes place in a harsh, amorphous now - the presence of AIDS marks a change from the film's source, Athol Fugard's novel, which was set in the 1950s (published in 1980).
That leads to 'Tootsie's' central question: Can a 40-ish New York actor find health, happiness and romance as a 40-ish New York actress? Dustin Hoffman is actually fairly plausible as 'Dorothy,' the actress. If his voice isn't quite right, a Southern accent allows it to squeak by. The wig and the glasses are a little too much, true, but in an uncanny way the woman played by Hoffman looks like certain actual women who look like drag queens. Dorothy might have trouble passing in Evanston, but in Manhattan, nobody gives her a second look.
Tsotsi Film Review
'Tootsie' might have been content to limit itself to the complications of New York life in drag; it could have been 'Victor/Victoria Visits Elaine's.' But the movie's a little more ambitious than that. Michael Dorsey finds to his interest and amusement that Dorothy begins to take on a life of her own. She's a liberated eccentric, a woman who seems sort of odd and funny at first, but grows on you and wins your admiration by standing up for what's right.
Tsotsi Movie Review
One of the things that bothers Dorothy is the way the soap opera's chauvinist director (Dabney Coleman) mistreats and insults the attractive young actress (Jessica Lange) who plays Julie, a nurse on the show. Dorothy and Julie become friends and finally close confidants. Dorothy's problem, however, is that the man inside her is gradually growing uncontrollably in love with Julie.