‘Associate’ Just Another Whoopi-Type Movie

When you get right down to it, “The Associate” is not all that different a film from “Sister Act” (1992), which in turn is not all that different from “Eddie” (1996) or “Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit” (1993). Some are runaway hits and some are not, of course, but they’re all variants on basically the same Whoopi Goldberg movie.

And Goldberg, despite a clunky start in the movies a decade ago, has cinched her stardom today by becoming everybody’s rebellious sweetheart: She’ll break the rules of society right and left, but only in the name of winning your affections. This is why Goldberg makes so many scrappy-underdog movies, and so many of them for the various Disney branches.

Because Disney loves a defiant struggler - just look back at “Pinocchio” (1940) or “The Shaggy Dog” (1959) - and nobody plays that “type” better than Goldberg. She is perfectly in her element in “The Associate” as Laurel Ayres, a brilliant Wall Street analyst who can’t land a promotion because of all those pesky men cutting in line ahead of her.

So Laurel invents a masculine persona she calls Robert J. Cutty - an arrogant, gruff-voiced wheeler-dealer version of herself that somehow manages to fool just about everybody in the film. The coming-attractions trailers have already given that element away, but the previews have cunningly declined to show the effectiveness of Goldberg’s transformation.

Now, Goldberg has long been doing male characters in her monologue routines, achieving the transformations with sheer belief in her craft, but this full-fledged conversion is a small marvel. Makeup artist Greg Cannom avoids the use of contact lenses or false teeth, allowing Goldberg to peek through the camouflage - but still it’s a convincing impersonation of a man who does not exist, and leagues beyond those foam-latex makeup indulgences of Eddie Murphy’s recent movies.

Too bad “The Associate” itself is strictly a recipe-book comedy, adapted from a French farce called “L’Associe.” There’s the underhanded rival (nice oily work from Tim Daly) whose treachery provokes Goldberg’s masquerade; the vicious gossip columnist (Lainie Kazan) who determines to ferret out the secret of Robert J. Cutty; the shrewd veteran investor (Eli Wallach) who is a nicer guy than he lets on; and the downtrodden assistant (Dianne Wiest) who becomes an unexpected ally in Goldberg’s fight against discrimination.

Director Donald Petrie lets fly with the laugh-getting situations, even as he trowels on the righteous moral of the story. “The Associate” rewards your patronage with a load of hilarity, but it’s basically a retread, with a therapeutic subtext that many people will find hard to take.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: “The Associate” Location: Lyons, Showboat cinemas Credits: Directed by Donald Petrie, starring Whoopi Goldberg, Eli Wallach, Dianne Wiest, Tim Daly Running time: 1:49 Rating: PG-13