User Reviews

This is what I call a "small film", but every once in a while it's a small film that gives you the opportunity to savor fine acting performances.

It seems as if quite a few of our reviewers don't like this film. I think that's because they expect Jane Fonda and Robert De Niro in a totally different types of films. I can't say that Jane Fonda is one of my favorite actresses, yet, almost every time I do see one of her films, I'm impressed. It wasn't until 1986 that I began to appreciate Robert De Niro. I learned that it wasn't his acting that turned me off; it was more the types of films that he often acted in. Now I like few things more than watching a good -- mature -- performance by a truly fine actor.

This is clearly not the type of role that we usually associate with Jane Fonda -- a poor woman who works in a bakery factory and has a family life that is less than ideal. She looks a little worn out...which is just right for the part. Surprisingly, she's perfect here.

It's a very different role for Robert De Niro, as well. He plays an illiterate who is fumbling through life. When he loses his job he has to put his elderly father into a public home for the aged, where he dies. That jogs De Niro to finally learn to read and write. ANd he asks Fonda to be his teacher. Of course, there's a lot of frustration in the process.

No film is perfect, and the weakness here is that we know that a romance is going to develop and that they will live happily ever after. It's kind of obvious. So, as with many films, the joy is not where the film is going, but how our characters arrive at that destination.

One of the things I like about this film is that it shows the lives of a socioeconomic group that we don't often see in films.

The primary supporting actor worth mentioning is Swoosie Kurtz. Kurtz was an actress who was quite popular for a while, and this film made me realize that I hadn't see her in a while. I looked her up and was surprised to learn that she was now in her 70s. She does a nice job here as Fonda's sister. Fonda's son here -- Harley Cross -- does a nice job...believable. Martha Plimpton, as the daughter, also does nicely.

Thankfully the mandatory sex scene -- a disastrous one -- is brief. But it exemplifies the somewhat awkward route to love these two people are having.

I'll tell how good I thought this film was. I wasn't feeling well the evening I started watching it. I was very tired, so I thought I'd watch maybe half the film, and finish the rest the following day. Nope, I stayed up until nearly 1:30 a.m. to finish it one sitting.

I give this a very strong "7". Recommended.

Stanley Cox (Robert DeNiro) is a great guy. He is kind-hearted, loyal, a hard worker, totally honest and intelligent. He is also kindly to his aging father whom he must put into a nursing home. There is only one problem. He can't read or write. That apparently happened because he slept through school and nobody bothered to wake him up, assuming he was just another dummy with no future ahead of him. That is until Iris King (Jane Fonda) comes along. This hard-working factory worker, a widow with a troubled family, takes an interest in his plight, and takes it upon herself to teach him how to read and write, falling in love in the process while getting over the memory of her late husband.

There is really little plot and not a sensible reason as to why Stanley has never learned to read and write. When Iris accidentally costs Stanley his job by revealing to his boss the truth about him, you really don't believe that she wouldn't stand up and fight for him. Stanley isn't an innocent like Dustin Hoffman's character in "Rain Man" or dim-witted like Lon Chaney's character in "Of Mice and Men"; He is a normal "Joe" whom I just couldn't believe would never leave his neighborhood or be able to purchase anything if he can't read or write, let alone count money or know what denomination he is giving a cashier. There is little information on how he has survived up until then, and that is where the film looses credibility.

Where it becomes entertaining is that the two characters are totally likable. It is very interesting to see these two Oscar Winning stars together in spite of the fact that Fonda publicly denounced "The Deer Hunter", the Oscar Winning Vietnam film from 1978 that starred DeNiro the very same year that Fonda won her Oscar for the anti-war "Coming Home". There is also little impact in the story with Fonda's family, which includes her troubled sister (Swoosie Kurtz, most of whose role must have been left on the cutting room floor) and her young daughter (Martha Plimpton). In a nice small role, "The Drew Carey Show's" Kathy Kinney plays one of Fonda's co-workers.

I really wanted to like this more than just your average "Hallmark" type movie. There is absolutely nothing offensive in it, and only two scenes that are even mildly disturbing-one the opening where DeNiro comes to Fonda's rescue after her purse is snatched on the bus, and the other the slap that Kurtz gets from her struggling husband. How many movies of the past 30 years can claim that they simply are showing life without all the ugliness surrounding it? Maybe that's the film's problem. It is all too nice and wrapped up neatly rather than brought to a more dramatic head.

This is a complex film that explores the effects of Fordist and Taylorist modes of industrial capitalist production on human relations. There are constant references to assembly line production, where workers are treated as cogs in a machine, overseen by managers wielding clipboards, controlling how much hair the workers leave exposed, and firing workers (Stanley) who meet all criteria (as his supervisor says, are always on time, are hard workers, do good work) but who may in some unspecified future make a mistake.

This system destroys families - Stanley has to send his father to a nursing home (where he quickly dies) after Stanley loses his job. Iris' daughter is a single teen mother who drops out of high school to take a job in the plant. References are made to the fact that now, with declining wages, both partners need to work, the implication being that there's nobody left at home to care for the kids. Iris' husband is dead from an illness, and with the multiple references in the film about the costs of medical care, the viewer must wonder if he might have lived with better and more costly care. Iris' brother in law gets abusive after yet another unsuccessful day at the unemployment office when his wife yells at him for buying a beer with her savings instead of leaving it for her face lift and/or teeth job (even the working class with no stake in conventional bourgeois notions of perfection and beauty buy into them). The one reference to race in the film is through a black factory line worker whose husband is in jail (presumably, he's also black, and black men suffer disproportionally high incarceration rates). She remarks that he, like her, "is doing time" - her family is composed of a prisoner and a wage slave.

Stanley, however, still believes in human relations and is therefore for most of the film outside of the system of Fordist capitalism. He cares for his father in spite of the fact that it was his father's traveling salesman job that resulted in his illiteracy - he has not yet reduced human relations to a purely instrumental contract, as Iris' brother in law does (suggesting that he "married the wrong sister"). He does not, as Iris says, conform to the work-eat-sleep routine of everyone else; rather, he uses technology and the techniques of industrial production in an artisanal and creative way, in a sort of Bauhaus ideal. This was the dream of early modernists and 1920's socialists (such as the Bauhaus) - to use technology to provide for all basic needs, allowing for more free time for creative human work and fuller human relations. He is also outside of traditional gender relations. He cooks, he cleans, he cares for his family, and he knows how to iron. Iris, on the other hand, lives in a traditionally male role - she's a factory worker, the mains source of income for her (extended) family, and she brings Stanley into the public realm, traditionally off-limits to women. By teaching him to read and write, she gives him access to the world of knowledge, also traditionally gendered male.

Literacy here is used as a metaphor for the (traditionally masculine) public realm and the systems of circulation (monetary, vehicular, cultural) that enable participation in the public realm. Without this access, Stanley is feminized - the jobs open to him are cooking and cleaning. He is excluded from all regular circulations, unable to participate in the monetary (can't open a bank account), in the vehicular (can't get a driver's license, can't ride the bus), and in the social (he asks if he exists if he can't write his name).

After learning to read, he grabs books on auto repair, farming, and spirituality (the Bible). The Word of God is therefore relativized, placed on the same value plane as how-to books. In fact, organized religion in general is only very occasionally present - the Bible also appears on a dresser as the camera pans to find Stanley and Iris having sex. It is, however, acknowledged as a moral force - Iris, clearly a character devoted to living a "good" life, mentions at the beginning of the film that her rosary was among the objects lost in a purse snatching.

Once able to read, he enters the system and lands a managerial position with a health care plan, a car, and a house, taking his place at the head of the family, the breadwinner. Presumably, he's an industrial designer, dreaming up products that will require others enduring the drudgery of the assembly line to produce. This ending, probably the only bit of conventional Hollywood in the film, is so incongruous with all that has come before that I at least wonder if it wasn't forced in by some Studio exec suddenly worried about the lack of a feel-good ending and its potential effect on the bottom line.

Now that, according to the pundits, we've comfortably moved on to post-industrial capitalism, the film also has a slightly nostalgic feel, as though we needed the historical distance to really analyze what happened during that period.

Nevertheless, it's highly recommended - at least if you want to exercise your brain. Disregard the ending, and it's close to a perfect 10.

This movie just doesn't work in the end, and that's a real shame because it's got a good premise and stars the greatest of all actresses.

WARNING. SPOILER.

I'll keep it vague, but I can't critique this film without discussing the ending.

Keeping it vague, let's just say that this ending is so "pie in the sky" as to be totally unbelievable. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with "happy endings," but they have to be realistic and this one isn't.

It's a shame, because Jane Fonda is simply the greatest of all actresses. The only other actress who has the same breadth as a dramatist and as a comedienne was Kate Hepburn, and she lacks Jane's emotional depth. Jane's played her "working class feminist" roles as a comedienne in "Nine to Five" where she employs the "facial English" and wide-eyed astonishment of "Cat Ballou." And in one of her greatest films, "The Dollmaker," she plays the "working class feminist" dramatically in a film that has a "happy ending" but one that's also realistic.

I see "Stanley and Iris" as the third in Jane's "working class feminist" trilogy, and it really is a shame that it's spoiled by a fairy-tale ending. The premise is really interesting, that Iris is just in such a funk of a depression and suffering from such low self-esteem after her husband's death that she winds up in a dead-end factory job and allows herself to be used by a no-good-nik brother-in-law who sponges off Iris and abuses her sister. That Stanley's caught in dead-end jobs because of his illiteracy. That Stanley and Iris finally make it together and that with Iris's help Stanley achieves some modicum of success.

But keep the ending realistic. That's where "The Dollmaker" succeeds and "Stanley and Iris" fails. I can't say more without creating too much of a spoiler.