This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival.
The Pitch: More than 40 years ago, 9 to 5 burst onto movie screens with a deceptively winning formula for 1980: Take three women at the top of their game — actress/producer/activist Jane Fonda, top-tier comedienne Lily Tomlin, and country music superstar Dolly Parton — and throw them together in the dreary workplaces of Carter-era America with a chauvinistic boss (Dabney Coleman) you’d just love to see tied up and tortured.
It may have played like a lark, thanks in no small part to a whip-smart script from Patricia Resnick (3 Women) and fanciful direction from Colin Higgins (Harold and Maude), but it had feminist teeth underneath the laughs, which led it to box-office success and decades of appreciation.
Decades later, Camille Hardiman and Gary Lane (Hollywood to Dollywood) pay homage to the cult film with Still Working 9 to 5, a portrait of the film’s unlikely making, its even more unlikely success, and the ripples it left in the world of women’s liberation through the eighties and beyond. That’s a pretty expansive brief for a retrospective doc like this, to be sure, and unfortunately, you can feel the filmmakers’ reach exceeding its grasp.
What A Way to Make A Living: In its first act, Still Working is pleasant enough, though it reeks of the kind of paper-thin fan doc Documentary Now! so expertly lampooned in “Searching for Mr. Larson: A Love Letter From the Far Side.” We get the usual talking-head interviews with the leads, which are charming enough (though would it have killed them to put Fonda, Tomlin, and Parton in a room together to recapture that chemistry? Scratch that, they filmed during COVID, it probably would have), paired with film clips and archival footage of women’s marches from the 1970s.
9 to 5, after all, was produced by Fonda’s production company, IPC Films, part of a long line of social-issue movies she’d produced up to that point (The China Syndrome, Coming Home). With this one, she wanted to highlight the plight of the budding women’s worker movement, this time through the lens of an accessible screwball comedy.
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