Celebrating the classic 1980 screen comedy 9 to 5 and its ongoing impact on gender politics in the workplace, this breezy documentary is both effortlessly likeable and depressingly timely. Cutting between recent and archive interviews with the film’s original co-starring trio of Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton, plus other key cast and crew, joint directors Camille Hardman and Gary Lane walk a careful line between elation and frustration, feel-good nostalgia and feel-bad feminist critique. World premiered at SXSW in March, Still Working 9 to 5 made its Canadian debut at Hot Docs earlier this month, with more festival bookings ahead including New Zealand’s DocEdge and Nantucket in June. A combination of starry cast, eternally topical political themes and engaging back story should ensure wider interest on big or small screen.
Directed by Colin Higgins, 9 to 5 starred Fonda, Tomlin and Parton as disgruntled female clerical workers who plot murderous revenge against their egotistical sexist boss, played to perfection by Dabney Coleman. This frothy farce was partly a knowing throwback to the zingy Hollywood screwball comedies of director Preston Sturges, but it grew out of the long-standing political activism of Fonda and her co-producer Bruce Gilbert, even taking its name from a campaign group for gender parity in the workplace founded by Karen Nussbaum and Ellen Cassedy. At the time the film was made, there were 20 million female office employees in the U.S., who typically earned 40 per cent less than their male equivalents, and were routinely denied promotion.
Higgins and Fonda’s Trojan Horse tactics, wrapping a serious message in knockabout comedy, proved highly effective. Despite opening to mixed reviews, 9 to 5 became a box office smash, earning over $100 million, equivalent to more than $300 million in 2022 terms. On top of winning widespread positive notices for her screen acting debut, Parton’s evergreen theme song also became a huge, double Grammy-winning hit.
Shot in zippy montage style with a jaunty musical soundtrack, Still Working 9 to 5 is a fairly genial, well-mannered affair. Everyone interviewed seems to have only warm memories of working together and shooting the movie. Personality clashes and backstage tensions, including Tomlin’s early doubts and fruitless attempts to leave the project, are glossed over smoothly. The studio also pressed for a more famous male co-star than Coleman, anxious that three of America’s most famous women could not carry a film between them. But none of the key players seem to carry any lasting resentment over this, understandably perhaps, since they were proved resoundingly correct. Success is the best revenge.
Still Working 9 to 5 revisits media reaction to 9 to 5, including some cringe-inducing clips of Parton politely fielding casual sexist leering from male talk show hosts, while pompous critics decry the film’s “heavy-handed” feminist message. Hardmann and Lane also chronicles the film’s long pop-culture afterlife, first as a sitcom co-starring Rita Moreno, which Fonda eventually disowned for drifting away from its original political message. The story was then rebooted as a stage musical, launching on Broadway in 2009 with Alison Janney in the cast. Moreno and Janney both feature among the interviewees here. A revamped stage version later played in London’s West End and across the globe, and is set to tour the U.S. later this year. A long-gestating sequel to the original movie has apparently now been shelved, although Fonda and Tomlin continue to share great screen chemistry in the Netflix comedy hit Grace and Frankie, with Parton making a cameo in the swan-song season this year.
While the first half of Still Working 9 to 5 feels like an anodyne celebrity love-fest in places, the more engaging latter section engages with the film’s thorny real-world political context. The long-running campaign for the U.S. Congress to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, enshrining gender parity in law. was a hot topic at the time 9 to 5 was released and remains a shamefully unresolved issue even today. Hardmann and Lane also touch on Anita Hilll’s 1991 sexual harassment cast against Clarence Thomas, the passing of the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the inspirational rise of high-powered female politicians like Kamala Harris, and more. A handful of British guests also feature, but the viewpoint here is overwhelmingly American.
Although some of these wider political and cultural ripples feel tenuous, 9 to 5 certainly foreshadowed the #MeToo movement by shining a light on workplace sexism and patriarchal bullying in the office. An archive interview clip with Harvey Weinstein, an investor in the Broadway musical, is included here for its toe-curling historical irony. With the rise of the gig economy and ongoing battles over the minimum wage, Fonda glumly concludes that women today are getting a worse deal than ever in the job market. As the final credits roll over Parton’s perky new recording of the film’s theme song, a duet with Kelly Clarkson, Still Working 9 to 5 is eager to end on a celebratory note. But it also leaves no doubt that many more glass ceilings still need to be shattered. Plenty more work to be done.
Directors, producers: Camille Hardman, Gary Lane
Cast: Jane Fonda, Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin, Dabney Coleman, Bruce Higgins, Karen Nussbaum
Cinematography: Brian Tweedt
Editing: Oreet Rees, Elisa Bonora
Music: Jessica Weiss
Production companies: Mighty Fine Entertainment (US), Twinzzone Productions (US), Artemis Rising Foundation (US)
Sales company: The Gersh Agency
In English
97 minutes
