Making Mr. Right
directed by Susan Seidelman
written by Floyd Byars and Laurie Frank
Orion Pictures

Perhaps it’s living in New York that makes me like Making Mr. Right. Susan Seidelman’s latest (she did Desperately Seeking Susan with Madonna, remember) is just one step up from farce: a lighthearted comedy of manners and sexual politics. As in many of the best Restoration comedies it does not otherwise resemble, the men are buffoons. In other words, it’s a movie from a decidedly feminine point of view. It is actually unusual in being a movie for the Cosmo reader—the young, single, urban, double Y’s. What was the last movie targeted so specifically at a female audience? The Turning Point? Desert Hearts?

Yes, all women know that millions of men are responsible citizens, loving fathers, husbands, and friends. All women also know that millions are not. As a young, urban, unattached female (if not quite a Cosmo reader), I find it easy to understand why men are the primary target in a movie that, to be fair, also lampoons Jews, Indians, Miami Cubans, the PR business, soaps, weddings, and several very distinct types of females. Perhaps all the man-bashing has only to do with the exigencies of plot. As the title suggests, our heroine, Frankie Stone, falls in love with an android, and a woman is not likely to fall for an android, unless she has been burned thrice too many times by the real thing.

As the movie opens we see Frankie (Ann Magnuson, the performance artist, plays it straight here) waking up on the couch where she has fallen asleep in front of the TV. She’s been waiting for Congressman Steve Marcus (Ben Masters), who has spent the entire night at the Little Miss Havana beauty pageant, hugging the contestants and drumming up votes for what he hopes will be his reelection. Understandably, his early-morning arrival with a stolen centerpiece for a forgive-me-darling bouquet doesn’t quite cut the mustard.

Frankie wants it to be easy come, easy go, but it isn’t. Since she’s not just his girlfriend but also his image consultant, she can afford the satisfaction of not only slamming the door in his face but also of dropping him as a client and sending out the final bill. Nevertheless, however distracting her job and red convertible, she cannot escape the daily pressures from Mom, Sis, friends, and the biological clock to find Mr. Right, or at least Mr. Tolerable. Not that anybody else in the Marcus cheering section has been blessedly happy. Mom threw Dad the lout out; Frankie’s friend Trish has been dumped by her soap star husband for Susan Anton; only Frankie’s greenhaired sister seems content—and she’s marrying a Miami Cuban busboy. Still, none of them can understand how Frankie could let Steve slip through her fingers. After all, says Trish, whatever his faults or shortcomings, “he earns his own keep,” and that can’t be said of all of them.

After dropping Steve as a client, Frankie has time on her hands, and she finds herself asked to represent the Chemtech Corporation’s latest invention—a remarkably humanlooking android named Ulysses (John Malkovich). She is to polish up his social graces and get him on the Johnny Carson show, but it gets more complicated than that. For unpolished or not and made (as he is) in the image of his snide creator. Dr. Jeff Peters (also played by Malkovich), Ulysses has all the charm his parent lacks. He promptly falls in love with Frankie.

It’s a predictable plot. Seidelman is probably never going to make her name as one of Hollywood’s great innovators. But while there are no large artistic leaps in this production, a great deal of attention has been paid to detail. The script is tight; it has no large holes in its logic, once you accept the fact that an android can look and act human, and we’ve suspended that much belief for a thousand other movies. The “60’s retro” look Seidelman created, carried through from Frankie’s headscarf and red convertible to the music, makes the movie nicely stylized and centered in a specific place, Miami, rather than (as is usually the case) floundering around in what could be any 80’s town in any state in the union.

There are several excellent performances. Seidelman has raided Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre not only for a very good hero/nerd in Malkovich, but for two superb supporting actresses as well. Glenne Headly as baby-voiced Trish on the rebound is wonderful, and Laurie Metcalf as Sandy is even better. Metcalf is so compact and determined and pushily desperate to get the misanthropic Jeff Peters out on a date as to be both moving and irritating at the same time—a difficult combination. All of them show up Magnuson, who, while never actively bad, is never actively good, either.

As a movie, Making Mr. Right is a foreseeable product of what is still the newly integrated Hollywood. Now Nora Charles is sending Nick off to Grant’s Tomb, not so much to get him out of the way but because he deserves it. Making Mr. Right is also exactly the film you might expect as a response to the now discredited Yale-Harvard study, in which statistics demonstrated the appalling unlikelihood any female over 25 has of getting married. In a world without tolerable men, what other solution is there but an android? It is the final feminine revenge.

This could, with some truth, be called a feminist movie. But feminist is one of those slippery words that can mean many things. Seidelman’s “feminist” viewpoint is not of the black and white variety, where men are irredeemable and women angelic. Steve may be a louse, but he does have his moments, and somebody falls for even plain, bumbling, sarcastic Dr. Peters. Frankie’s patronizing treatment of Peters, when he’s done her a favor and agreed to come as her date to her sister’s wedding, is unkind and unfair, for all his preposterousness. Trish, being of the school that any man is better than no man at all, puts more pressure on Frankie to get back with Steve than even Steve does. All of which is to say, it’s not really like life, but it’s as confused and mixed as life is, and that gives the movie a surprising subtlety.

Seidelman understands that characters with no redeeming features belong to tragedy, not comedy, and so avoids them. And a man who is dragged by his girlfriend or wife to see Making Mr. Right can take some comfort in remembering that the only truly wonderful character in the movie, while not exactly a man, is at least a male, not a female, android.