Word: tomlin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Tasty Meadows is the setting of Lily Tomlin's latest vehicle The Incredible Shrinking Woman, a movie which, at its outset, promises to be a wicked satire of the TV age, filled with subtle humor, razor-sharp ridicule of American pop culture, and ingenious manipulation of every tiny comic detail of insipid domestic life. Unfortunately, Shrinking Woman--in its last half hour--reneges on its tacit deal with the audience, degenerating from incisive social satire to the silly comedy-adventure shenanigans of a Gene Wilder--Richard Pryor movie. Director Joel Schumacher and scriptwriter Jane Wagner let the film slowly slide...
...Lily Tomlin aspires to Chaplinesque heights of comic intuition and craftsmanship. As a movie performer. Tomlin has every other American comedian beat--the nebbishness of Woody Allen, the manic antics of Mel Brooks, and the shrill flightiness of Goldie Hawn cannot come close. Such comics lack Tomlin's mastery of the subtle comic flourish, the slight gesture or tiny twitch that not only reveals character but grabs the Big Laugh as well...
...Kramer--the suburban housewife who finds herself shrinking as a result of over-exposure to the many mysterious chemicals in the innumerable deodorants, detergents, dishwashing liquids, hairsprays, etc., that she can't live without--Tomlin is this year's model of Suzy Homemaker. Struggling to maintain an efficient, happy household, Pat Kramer is the confused, vaguely liberated woman; her license plate reads MS. MOM, Well-versed in pop culture and self-improvement jargon, Pat wants to be the Complete Woman, the mother-lover-maid with her own personal space and identity and everything else Phil Donahue's guests tell...
...Tomlin's party from the first frame to the last. She delivers several abysmally stupid lines with such true conviction that you're forced to, at least, let out a light chuckle. If only Shrinking Woman could have maintained the comic intelligence that Tomlin displays, it could have been a much needed clever satire. But instead, it lacks the courage to fulfill its initial convictions. Schumacher and Wagner would have been better off leaving clever Simians to Tarzan and Clint Eastwood...
...from a giggly hen party to an answer to the working woman's prayer: a "liberated" work space, complete with racial harmony, reformed alcoholics, a day-care center and athletic amputees vaulting merrily from wheelchair to desk chair. Through the ordeal, Lily and Dolly prove themselves game professionals. Tomlin is a crackerjack comic actress, even when the confection is stale, and Parton has as fetching a way with a line of dialogue as she has with the curve of an angora sweater. Only Fonda succumbs: she plays her character like a cross between Barbarella and Barbie doll. But that...