As Daniel Hillard, a sometime actor who, in the guise of a 62-year-old Scottish nanny, ingratiates himself in the employ of his estranged wife in order to be close to her and his three kids, Robin Williams reveals how easy it is to hang a slim, one-joke idea on a virtuoso performance. Free of the post-feminist conceits which informed Sydney Pollack's Tootsie (1982), where a temperamental Dustin Hoffman donned drag to score the female lead in a TV soap opera, Mrs Doubtfire, as directed by Chris Columbus, from a screenplay by Randi Mayem Singer and Leslie Dixon, has no qualms about wearing its sentimental heart on its sleeve. Almost unrecognisable in his corpulent female underpadding and senior citizen makeup, the firing-on-all-pistons Williams is in his element here, pinballing hilarious ad-libs and non-sequiturs with a manic zeal not seen since his star turn in Barry Levinson's Good Morning Vietnam back in 1987. Sally Field, Pierce Brosnan and Harvey Fierstein are the co-starring "straight men" who gamely step up to the pitch but wisely concede the picture to Williams' tour-de-force batting.
