In the original formulation of the Enneagram, Threes, Sixes and Nines are considered pure types, in the sense that they most deeply embody certain basic dilemmas. Threes, for instance, are most thoroughly preoccupied with image, although image-confusion is a problem for Twos and Fours. Fives, Sixes and Sevens all have an emotional core of fearfulness, but Sixes are the most consciously afraid. Nines are the most prone to self-forgetting and sleepy, angry oblivion, though Eights and Ones both have their own form of inner sleep.
These pure styles are well displayed in this biting Billy Wilder satire. The subject is Threeish corporate life circa 1960. Jack Lemmon plays the Six, a nervous, likable, cowed underling who romanticizes authority and harbors Threeish ambitions to rise to the top of corporate life, specifically to the statusy 27th floor of his company's building.
Lemmon's Three boss Fred MacMurray calls him "loyal, cooperative and resourceful." Masochistic is more like it. Lemmon strains to be ingratiating. He will do anything to court his bosses while rationalizing their poor treatment of him. Even when Shirley MacLaine stands Lemmon up for a date, he explains her behavior away and promptly asks her out again.
The film's title alludes to Lemmon's practice of allowing his bosses to use his apartment for extramarital affairs. This sordid arrangement leaves him little more than a pimp, one time catching cold on a windy park bench while waiting for a superior to finish with a tryst. Lemmon gets a promotion, though, and grows impressed with himself. In this way, he shows a Six's connection to the low side of 3. They can grow vain, competitive and deceitful.
Three boss MacMurray is a hard, insensitive liar - dim, fraudulent and cagey all at the same time. His second-in-command, Ray Walston, is exactly the same way. Shirley MacLaine plays a role that is both sexist and yet accurately Niney. An "Elevator Girl" in the corporate building and a self-described "happy idiot," MacLaine is portrayed as a passive-dependent slave to love. "Why can't I ever fall in love with anybody nice like you?" she asks Lemmon as she pines away for MacMurray. The latter won't leave his wife and gives mistress MacLaine $100 for Christmas, prompting a suicide attempt that Lemmon loyally covers up.
This film shows a Six struggling between his stress and security points. The low side of 3 tempts Lemmon greatly but the high side of 9 is what he chooses at film's end. He recovers his integrity, quits his job and chooses love over crass ambition. Actually he's still ambitious but he also wants honor.
More Enneatype casting as Jack
Lemmon is a Six with a 7 wing in real life. He played Sixes many, many times
before broadening his range in the 1970s and '80s. The man Lemmon plays
in The China Syndrome (1979) could be seen as an older version of the Apartment
character. He's a loyal company man who nevertheless keeps his integrity.
Michael Douglas plays an Eight and Jane Fonda is something of a Three in
this latter (terrific) film. Wilford Brimley has a small but pivotal role
as Lemmon's Nine assistant.
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Broadcast News
This story centers on the personal lives of three people who work in a TV
news station. William Hurt plays a privileged, lucky, vacant Nine, rather
like Dan Quayle. Albert Brooks and Holly Hunter both play Sixes - he phobic
and she counterphobic - and the contrast between their two styles is very
well done.
Brooks is whiny, dependent, loyal and anxious. Hunter is tough, driven, combative and anxious. He is openly self-doubting and addled with failure. She channels her fears into hyperactive work, succeeding despite herself while trying to compensate for her wobbly personal life. She could be mistaken for an Eight or a One in some of the scenes, but the core of her aggression is fear and loyalty to the job. He fails at work, she fails at home.
The film itself is literate, intelligent, well-acted, yet somehow not really about anything. Brooks is a real-life Six and almost always plays them.
Class Action
Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is Gene Hackman's daughter in this nicely acted
character study. They are rival lawyers representing opposite sides of an
automaker's negligence suit. She's a yuppie-like counterphobic Six. Hackman's
a flamboyant, politically radical Eight, so they are ideologically opposed
as well.
Mastrantonio's character at first sounds like a One, but it soon becomes clear that her principles can be compromised by loyalty to the company, and she has a Threeish streak of ambition. She also has anxiety attacks, justice issues, and a certain nervous lovability. She's not quite her own person - watching her, you feel as if she's someone's daughter. This younger-than-their-years quality is very common with Sixes if their full adult power is still projected onto some outer authority. In this case it's the father; while loyal to her law firm, Mastrantonio is rebellious and counterphobic towards Hackman.
One of Hackman's legal assistants, Oneish Larry Fishburne, puts the daughter's dilemma beautifully when he says to her, "Your father owns you. If he stands up, you sit down. If he turns right, you turn left, even if you don't want to. Your biggest aspiration is to be the opposite of what he is. The problem is that you don't know what he is - that makes being you impossible!"
Later she tells Hackman, "I've spent my whole life being angry with you. It's been a constructive anger; I've gotten a lot done. You were my scapegoat. If anything ever went wrong I could blame you." This may not seem like a statement of dependency, but it is. In the end she recovers her own integrity and courage.
Gene Hackman is extremely good as a healthy Eight. His character goes from aggressive narcissism to unguarded tenderness by the film's end. In the process he learns to apologize, a useful thing for Eights.
The few scenes between Hackman and his wife are good, succinct examples of an Eight/One dynamic. She disapproves of his blustery defenses but loves his dedication to defending underdogs. He's afraid of her in the way John Wayne fears Katharine Hepburn in Rooster Cogburn. Hackman's a real-life counterphobic Six, by the way.
Colin Friels plays Mastrantonio's lover, another corporate
Three. Mastrantonio's counterphobic Six has a 7 wing.
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Crimes And Misdemeanors,
Hannah And Her Sisters, Husbands And Wives
However you feel about Woody Allen's movies, they are chock-full of Enneagram styles. Allen is a Six in real life and it's possible to look at his body of films as a Six endlessly repeating variations on the same neurotic themes; "repetition compulsion," this is called in the trade.
Allen knows just enough about his characters to show how they don't know themselves. The results are films that accurately capture neurotic predicaments and therefore Enneagram skews. The same deluded conditions exist from movie to movie - there's rarely any resolution or awakening. Once in a while, Allen's own Six character learns something, but he's forgotten it by the next film.
It's not accurate or fair to evaluate an artist's productions solely in the light of their personality style - two or three of Allen's films are quite masterful and transcend his usual limits. But nearly every Allen story has Sixes in it and his recurrent themes always track back down to a basic fear of life.
Among Allen's more Sixish elements and themes: ambivalence in relationships; loving the wrong person and getting rejected; loving the right person and not realizing it; being unable to make up one's mind; fear of success; getting away with appalling deeds; avoiding personal responsibility; trying to find security in a dangerous world; trying to find moral certainty in an empty, impersonal universe.
Crimes And Misdemeanors is Allen's play on Dostoyevski's
novel Crime And Punishment. In the book, the main character Raskolnikov
commits a murder to prove his superiority to the laws of man, but he's gradually
undone by his own latent conscience. In this film, the consequences are
darkly reversed. Ophthalmologist Martin Landau is involved in a murder that
he gets away with completely.
He's a Six (5 wing), full of conscious conscience and philosophical angst about the deed. He projects his guilt and responsibility onto an outside authority and imagines God is watching his every move. His expectation is that a cosmic moral force will swoop down and smite him for his deed. He searches for the moral certainty of punishment, flirting with the possibility of getting caught for an action he knows was born out of cowardice.
Landau is security-minded, and the murder is motivated by the possible loss of his home and family. He's had an affair with an "emotionally hungry" Two (Anjelica Huston) and she's threatened to expose both the affair and some of Landau's financial improprieties. "This woman's going to destroy everything I've built. Is what she's doing to me just? Is this what I deserve? I will not be destroyed by this neurotic woman." Landau twists the situation in his own mind so that he becomes the victim. Maintaining security is the issue; note that he's actually not grieving Huston's personal demise. Her death relieves him of one set of consequences but then he fears new ones.
Instead, nothing happens. The murder gets blamed on another killer. Landau gradually goes back to his "protected world of wealth and privilege." After all his anxiety and crises of faith, in the end he sleeps fine.
Landau and Allen's Six character make an interesting contrast. Both are self-doubters, but Landau is successful (high side of 3) while Allen is a loser who continually shoots himself in either available foot. Allen's in dependent tension to a very Eightish Seven (Alan Alda), a warm, buffoonish TV producer who represents a shallow type of success that Allen's character both scorns and envies. Allen first gives power to Alda, and then is passive/aggressive and sabotaging. In the end, though, it's Allen who winds up self-defeated and bereft.
Jerry Orbach plays Landau's brother, an Eight upon whom Six Landau is dependent. Orbach is a hardened crook with soul-dead eyes and ties to organized crime that help him carry out the murder for his brother. Laudau gives him that power but then later blames him for the deed anyway.
Anjelica Huston's histrionic Two is crisply well-observed. She's gone demanding and vengeful (low side of 8) and is emotionally blackmailing Landau in the name of love. As she crosses boundaries - threatening to come to his house and talk to his wife - she seems selfish, prideful and guilt-inducing.
Sam Waterston plays a One Rabbi, a voice of moral certainty who ironically has an eye disorder and is going blind. Another moral force in the film is a Five philosopher whom Allen's character is filming for a biography. His fate is ironic too. Mia Farrow rounds out the cast as a likely Three. This is probably Woody Allen's masterpiece. However morally cynical it is, the film is excellent on every level.
Speaking of getting away with things, Michael Caine plays a successful married man who falls in love with his wife's sister and has a never-discovered affair in Hannah And Her Sisters. Caine's character fluctuates between Nine and Six, though he's mostly meant to be a Six. (During filming, Caine reportedly said to Allen, "Oh, I get it - I'm supposed to be a 6 foot 2 you.")
Mia Farrow plays Hannah as a nice Two and Barbara Hershey is the sister, sort of a Nine (she's mainly a male fantasy). The other clear styles include Dianne Wiest as another sister, an insecure Six. Max Von Sydow plays a crabby elitist Four, an artist who mostly communicates through faultfinding monologues. He's a jealous intimate subtype, which makes him sound like a One but he isn't.
The chief reason to see Hannah is Allen's character progression. He plays his usual phobic role but the dilemma of Sixes is unusually distilled here. He's a hypochondriac who has a health crisis and a change in career. This leads to a self-doubting philosophical search for certainty which finally gives way to a kind of faith. "Why the hell don't I just stop searching for answers I'll never get and begin to enjoy life, since I'm going to die anyway?" he wonders. At the end he's calm, serene and congruent, like Woody Allen never is (high side of 9).
The rest of the film is a well-acted, if overpraised, soufflé. Kind of glib, kind of pleasant, just better than okay. Note that Caine's involvement with the two sisters is a metaphor for incest.
Husbands And Wives is Allen's next best movie, although it's nearly wrecked by constant, dizzying, hand-held camera work. Fortunately you can turn off a VCR and take breaks. It's worth seeing if only for the edgy, hilarious Judy Davis performance. She's a riot as a brittle, compulsive, counterphobic Six, a woman who alternates between modes of tactless self-absorption and crazed overcontrol. Woody Allen plays his usual Six character within the film and even he describes her as cerebral.
The story tracks two couples over several years as they variously divorce, reconcile, date others and crack apart. The humor ranges from rueful to bitter, as the characters swirl through a roundelay of attractions and repulsions. No one really knows themself and each has insights into their own behavior that are never quite right.
Film director Sydney Pollack plays Davis's husband, Gabriel, and he's pretty much a Three. He rationalizes like a Seven sometimes, but he's mainly characterized by a confused absence of feeling. He's not quite hard, but rather emotionally undeveloped and function-oriented ("Whatever works is the deal"). Pollack's a real-life Six.
Davis gets involved with architect Michael (Liam Neeson), a brooding Four. Neeson's a romantic malcontent whose ex-wife told him he should have lived in another century. His heartfelt overtures are mostly wasted on the oblivious Davis. Later she describes to her therapist how she remained disassociated during sex with Neeson: "My mind just gets racing with thoughts. I thought that Michael was a hedgehog and Gabe was a fox. I thought about all the people I know and which were hedgehogs and which were foxes."
Neeson, in turn, is being chased by Allen's wife Mia Farrow. Juliette Lewis is rather like Barbara Hershey in Hannah, a Niney, indefinite, seductive, younger woman. Allen is attracted to her and then "virtuously" resists temptation. Mariel Hemingway played a similar role in Manhattan, as a Nine teenager Allen falls for. This echoes Allen's real-life romantic involvement with his own stepdaughter and reflects how a Six could romanticize Nineyness.
Hamlet, 1990
A literary critic named George Steiner once wrote an essay called, "Is
Tragedy Really Possible in a Democratic Society?" In it he argued that
tragedy in literature is only possible if a character lacks personal freedom
and is then victimized by a higher ruling power. In a democracy, where people
theoretically have free choice, it is much harder to make a character's
destiny seem inevitable and thus out of their own hands.
I thought about this idea while watching Mel Gibson (really pretty good) play Hamlet as a counterphobic Six. Director Franco Zeffirelli gives this version a colorful, sumptuous look, without the moody tones of Laurence Olivier's 1948 film. Stripped of melancholy and portrayed with a core of fear, this Hamlet starts to seem far less justified in his actions. Instead of being afflicted by a larger condition of existence, he sounds more like a vindictive Six who is simply refusing his own power.
"His will is not his own." Indeed, Gibson's power spins away from him while he goes in agitated circles. He quite aggressively drives Ophelia crazy. He seethes with anger, mainly towards older men. His humor is flippant and antiauthoritarian. He is caught in the vow of loyalty to his murdered father, but it's still somehow beside the point. Even the famous "To Be or Not To Be" speech sounds like a wonderfully phrased excuse, as if Hamlet is talking himself out of the need to do something productive with his life.
The King as played by Alan Bates is unusually sympathetic, which makes Hamlet's vindictiveness towards him seem even more infantile. Zeffirelli tries to compensate a little by making Mel Gibson hunky, but in the end this Hamlet is far less comfortable to watch than Olivier's. His actions nevertheless make far more human sense coming from a Six than a Four. What's interesting, though, is that both this film and Olivier's version work.
There is another Hamlet on video that doesn't. Nicol Williamson
played the role controversially in the 1960s as a One. He gives the character
Oneish outrage over the king's slaying, which is fair enough. But then he
holds the stance of righteous anger throughout the play. This gives Hamlet's
actions and nonactions a moral dignity that doesn't square with the damage
he does to everyone. Williamson's reading strains against the text, although
his acting is technically flawless. The result is a performance that's interesting
to watch yet hard to feel anything for.
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Pleasant fantasy-comedy features Martin Short as a phobic hypochondriac. He works as a supermarket checker, is prone to panic attacks, and has recurrent nightmares of overcharging a customer with orange hair, who then takes out a gun and shoots him.
Short is accidentally thrust into danger when he is injected with the results of a miniaturization experiment. Military pilot Dennis Quaid is inside an experimental vehicle that has been shrunk to microscopic size and after the accident he is navigating around inside Short's body.
Quaid plays his usual persona, which is a Seven with an 8 wing, same as Jack Nicholson. His pilot is a rambunctious man of action, irresponsible, charming and wild. "When things are at their darkest, pal, it's a good man who can kick back and party."
Once injected, Quaid finds a way to communicate with Short
and their interactions become a metaphor for the inner life of a Six. Quaid
represents the instinctual, physically daring part of Short, which he gradually
has to bring out during the story. With Quaid's coaching, Short changes
from phobic to counterphobic and claims his own power to act decisively.
By story's end, he's taking risks and really enjoying himself.
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This is a sweet, quirky Australian character study not to be confused with an American film of the same name. Latter is an SCT (Stupid Creepy Thriller) featuring Eric Roberts as a con-man Three and Beverly D'Angelo as a dependent, addictive Six. It's not too bad for its Enneagram styles but pointless otherwise. The Australian film - a gentle comedy - is much better and does not tell the same story at all.
The movie opens with the first social gropings of an introverted piano tuner (Norman Kaye) stepping out after the death of his live-in mother. Seeking to live it up, he enrolls with a dating service and soon meets spinsterish Wendy Hughes. They date, fall in love, act in a play, break up and reconcile.
The story's main appeal is its characters. Kaye's a Nine (1 wing) who's breaking away from a dutiful low-profile life as a Good Son. He has a sense of fun, a few Bad Son habits (like shoplifting), and he routinely sabotages the wishes of his demanding Two sister. He has the sly, sleepy roguishness of a Walter Matthau.
Hughes, a normally beautiful actress, is scrubbed plain here. Kaye's sense of fun especially appeals to her shy, phobic Six character. She has a 5 wing and is shown to be timidly caught in a tense attempt to appease her elderly parents.
The family dynamic shown is one of several typical for phobic Sixes. Hughes's father is a domineering One with a 2 wing. He is bullying and overly protective, but a loving father from his point of view. He installs doubt and invites dependency with every remark, but he's convinced that the meek Hughes needs his guidance. The mother is a swarming Two who hysterically comments on everything that could go dangerously wrong in her daughter's life.
Hughes is, however, in her thirties and she has only just recently moved away from home. She's allowed her parents to keep her scared and self-doubting. She takes few chances and has trouble trusting people other than her mother and father. Early in the story she romanticizes them to Kaye and it's clear that she's loyal towards their oppression. She's afraid of the responsibility of taking steps on her own and instead hides dependently under their umbrella.
There's one telling scene where Hughes and Kaye bed down for the first time. She puts limits on the encounter and asks if they can avoid sex that first night. Kaye agrees but later, when they are drawn to each other, he gets carried away. Hughes leaps out of bed and flees as though running from attempted rape. She then refuses to see or speak to Kaye for weeks as she calms down her fears, builds a case against him and plans to avoid him for good.
All this might not be an overreaction, but Hughes is a virgin and she never told Kaye. As a Six she made the world more dangerous than it had to be and then fled the danger. Her lack of trust led to her concealing her inexperience which led to a worse but self-confirming result. She set herself up.
Of course, at film's end, she has to choose between Kaye
and her parents. Of course, she plucks up her courage to live her own life.
The way the film resolves is low-key and affectionate and a good example
of a Six changing for the better. The director of the play that Kaye and
Hughes act in is most likely a Seven with an 8 wing, though he sounds like
a Two at first. Some Sevens do because both styles can be flamboyant and
talk in grandiose ways.
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Patti Rocks
I have a certain fondness for this comedy, but be warned that it's a scalding
look at male/female relationships. The most controversial aspects of the
script are the appalling, grotesque and pathetic monologues spoken by main
character Chris Mulkey about women. He's an entranced Six with a strong
7 wing, and his bizarre observations are rooted in sexual dependency and
irresponsibility. Some of the comedy is otherwise funny and Mulkey certainly
gets what he deserves in the end.
The setup is that the married Mulkey has impregnated a woman he barely knows named Patti Rocks (Karen Landry). She lives some distance away, doesn't know that he's married, and Mulkey can't reach her by phone to talk her into having an abortion. He enlists friend John Jenkins, a One, to take a night drive in the middle of winter to help him clean up this extramarital mess.
Actually "help" is the wrong word. Mulkey wants Jenkins to talk to Patti for him. Mulkey is a whiny, dependent victim-of-himself who displaces responsibility onto anyone available. He moans, wheedles and pleads for Jenkins's help. When that doesn't work, he angrily guilt-trips him and keeps haranguing until Jenkins gives in. The pattern is repeated throughout the story whenever Mulkey tries to dance away from accountability.
As an anxious Six, Mulkey projects his power onto the sure-sounding Jenkins. The latter says no adamantly to each demand and gives Mulkey One-style lectures before giving in to the weaseling ("C'mon, please help me. You gotta. Please, I can't tell her. This is the last time!"). At one point, Mulkey even talks Jenkins into lending him his underwear.
Mulkey's most afraid of disappointing Landry, believing she will be angry to discover he's married. He needn't have worried; Landry has her own agenda and this fact forms the basis of Mulkey's emotionally brutal comeuppance. She's a Seven and quite similar to the Lena Olin character in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being (see "Sevens").
Jenkins is first seen as snappish and perfectionistic, and then more relaxed and playful (a One's connection to 7). Somehow he relates to Mulkey's monologues, which is not a good sign. Later Jenkins shows a little melancholy (connection to 4) during a scene when he tells Landry, "Somewhere down the line something went wrong and you spend the whole rest of your life trying to figure it out."
Send Me No Flowers
Before there was Woody Allen there was ... Rock Hudson. It was quite surprising
to come across Hudson's old comedies and discover that his ongoing screen
character was that of a phobic Six. Send Me No Flowers is a frothy little
yarn. It may not be the best of Hudson's movies but it's an especially good
showcase for his dour, fussy, anxious persona. He has a different look and
manner than Woody Allen, of course, but that's part of the joke. Hudson
was a big, capable-looking man in contrast to his character's comic cowardice.
If you listen closely to both actors, though, you'll hear the same Sixish
tendency: chronic anxious anticipation.
In Send Me No Flowers, Hudson plays a flaming hypochondriac, so the negative anticipation is about his health. The first hour of the movie is actually quite funny as it details Hudson's downward drive towards the goal of finding something wrong with himself. He starts over breakfast complaining to cheery wife Doris Day about a pain in his chest. When she dismisses it as probable indigestion, he starts in: "You can just sit there and laugh about it but men my age are dropping dead." "I'm not a hypochondriac. Someday when I'm lying in a hospital in my bed of pain you'll change your tune!" "I'd better cancel that lunch date the way I'm feeling." When Day asserts that he could probably risk a cup of tea, he muses: "Well, I don't suppose a cup of weak tea would be so bad ..."
By the time Hudson makes it to the doctor, he's in a fever of anxiety and suspiciously disbelieves the doctor's diagnosis of indigestion:
Hudson: "But what about this pain? You mean I can just live a normal life?"
Doctor (writing): "You can just take one of those pills I gave you, right now if you want."
Hudson: "Right now! You make it sound so urgent! Is that my chart?
Doctor: "Yes."
Hudson: "Aren't you doing an awful lot of writing for indigestion?"
Hudson then focuses his anxieties on the results of a recent cardiogram, still being processed by another doctor ("He's certainly been ... studying it for quite a while"). This drives him to eavesdrop on a phone conversation his doctor has about a terminal patient, and Hudson mistakenly decides it's him ("Finally my hypochondria has paid off").
After the news of his supposed doom sinks in, Hudson sets about planning for his own death. He shows a behavior change very typical for Sixes facing tangible crisis - he gets calm. He makes secret funeral arrangements with mortuary director Paul Lynde (an effeminate male Two). With friend Tony Randall he begins to scout for a new husband for Day to succeed Hudson after his death ("I want a man who can afford to give Judy the things I went into debt for!"). He rejects a number of candidates ("Married to that cornball? Impossible! Why I'd ... I'd live first!") before the plot gets increasingly silly.
Clint Walker emerges as a rival for Day's affections and he's a Three. The other characters' styles are not so clear. Doris Day seems somewhere in the Three/Two range. In her other films she tended to play Ones. Tony Randall is too busy reacting to Hudson's circumstances to have his own style, but he's a One in real life.
See if you can count the number of times Hudson, as a Six, finds some dark possibility in each new situation or idea. The pattern is present in nearly everything he says.
"A multiphobic personality with acute separation anxiety and a strong need for family." That's how psychiatrist Richard Dreyfuss describes his client-from-hell, Bob, a phobic Six played by Bill Murray.
The story is simple. Frightened, helpless-acting patient follows his shrink on vacation and won't let him alone. The movie takes the dependent tendency within a phobic Six and magnifies the trait to comic proportions. Murray romanticizes Dreyfuss's power and authority while he flatters and cajoles his way into the latter's life.
While Dreyfuss - a vain, preening Three - loudly resents Bob's invasion of his life and boundaries, the clever screenplay reframes such reactions as unreasonable. Most of Dreyfuss's complaints are absolutely justified, but he's so unsympathetic that we don't care.
Basically, Bob is a stalker. It's a tribute to Bill Murray's comic skills that we don't really think about the hostility hidden within Bob's dependency. Lots of horror movies have been made from this exact same material. "Human Crazy Glue" is what Dreyfuss calls Bob, and this story has some similarity to Fatal Attraction and Unlawful Entry, two SCTs that feature maliciously dependent Twos.
That aside, the movie is pleasantly funny. Dreyfuss, the egotistical Three, has just written a self-help book and has a lot riding on its success. He's status-seeking, competitive and patronising. His glib therapeutic prescriptions to Bob are met with fawning idolatry and Dreyfuss's vanity hooks on Bob's adoration. He has a 4 wing and is less people-oriented than a Three with a 2 wing. He also shows a touch of envy.
Note that Dreyfuss has high expectations of his children; that they learn well and behave. Three parents can sometimes expect model children that reflect well on the parent's image as a good father or mother. Murray's Bob, of course, has great rapport with Dreyfuss's children precisely because he's a giant four-year-old himself.
Julie Hagerty plays Dreyfuss's Nine wife. She's a ditsy, good-natured minimizer. The more Dreyfuss objects to Bob, the more she misses the point. This, of course, serves the plot, but it's done in a very Niney way. Hagerty is a real-life Nine and always plays them.
This is one of those uncommon comedies that successfully
sustains its tone. When you know Bill Murray's a Six, the film gets funnier
and your kids will like it anyway.
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