Line #66 Headscratchers/MrsDoubtfire


1	* How could Daniel call the petting zoo and invite all the small children in the neighborhood over in a mere five minutes to celebrate in the infamous party he threw only to risk his marriage over?
2	** He planned ahead. He probably arranged everything in secret, making sure Miranda wouldn't find out about anything. The real question is: why did he even book the petting zoo in the first place? Right afterwards, Miranda and Daniel's argument suggests that he's done things as crazy as this several times before. If this were the first time Daniel had screwed up, Miranda would have probably forgiven him, but the petting zoo results in Miranda admitting that he's ruined her life and wants divorce. You would think that by that point, Daniel would know it would upset Miranda and wouldn't want to risk ruining his relationship.
3	*** If Daniel was capable of making mature, rational decisions then the entire plot would never have happened. It's pretty much the whole reason his marriage fails.
4	*** Also, Daniel didn't know Miranda would arrive home from work early. He arranged everything in secret and was optimistic enough to think that he could have the party and get rid of the animals, children, decorations and all other evidence of it before she came home, and she'd never know. Daniel took an immense risk - even if Miranda had arrived home a few hours later, him being able to clean up such a wild party in time was a ''very'' long shot.
5	* How is Mrs. Doubtfire being paid? She has no identification, no bank account, [[IntimidatingRevenueService no 1099 forms...]]
6	** Related: didn't Miranda check Mrs. Doubtfire's references?
7	** Mrs. Doubtfire's references were in England and this was before Google so they weren't as easy to look up. Plus Miranda was easily won over by Mrs. Doubtfire so she may not have felt the need to check the references. As for the money issue, it's possible Daniel/Mrs. Doubtfire asked to be paid in cash so as to avoid any problems with the bank.
8	** Daniel made her out to be a very stereotypical CoolOldLady type, one of the stereotypes of them is that they "don't trust banks" and prefer cash in a secure place in their homes, also I'm sure if Miranda had needed references he would use his brothers number or something and answer the phone himself in another character.
9	* Why did Frank and Jack waste so much time (and materials) experimenting with so many vastly different looks when trying to come up with the Mrs. Doubtfire disguise (other than, y'know, a few minutes of letting Robin Williams be Robin Williams)? Professional prosthetic makeup is expensive, and each of those looks would have taken hours! The best thing would have been to ask Daniel what sort of character he was going for, come up with a few designs on paper, and work from there.
10	** And also, Daniel had already got an interview using the Mrs Doubtfire voice/persona, so there was no point at all to him doing all those Cuban, Russian and Jewish accents. Critics like Roger Ebert said one of the movie's flaws is that it stops dead in its tracks three times to allow Robin Williams a few minutes of being Robin Williams.
11	*** The accents were almost certainly just Daniel joking around, inventing characters he thought matched up with each disguise (underscoring the failure to nail the "Doubtfire" look with each attempt), rather than potential alternatives to the persona he had already created.
12	** The timeframe can only be explained as artistic license. The real life Doubtfire makeup took hours of preparation, but in-universe we see Daniel putting it on and off in a matter of minutes at a time.
13	** I can only assume that Frank and Jack wanted to practice some new makeup techniques. Most of the things they wanted to try had absolutely nothing to do with Daniel's scheme, but he was willing to let them try the stuff anyway just so they could get practice. In exchange, they agreed to actually do the character he wanted once they were done with all the other stuff.
14	** There's another possibility based on Frank's lines after each disguise, like "I think we have to go to the next level--latex." It's possible that Daniel already knew that the end result would be the GrannyClassic look, but Frank and Jack weren't sure exactly what materials and techniques they would need to create it--would Daniel be able to pass himself off with just makeup, a single prosthetic, or, as they eventually determine, an entire mask including fake teeth? Each new look is Frank and Jack testing one of those methods out and realizing that it won't work, and Daniel simply has some fun pretending to be a character while they do it.
15	* When Daniel's reaction to shoving the cigarette into Pudgy's mouth gets questioned. His boss and daughter Lydia reply "actors" What exactly did they mean by that?
16	** Actors can be annoying for directors I guess.
17	** Most definitely confirmed--while some directors work with their actors on a personal level, others simply want actors to say their lines and get on with the job; Daniel's boss was clearly in the latter camp. Lydia's saying it also foreshadows Miranda's remarks later that Daniel frequently lost acting jobs because of his refusal to compromise.
18	* How the heck did Daniel land a job at the end? In the 1990s, could you really get away with having a hairy man play an elderly Englishwoman in a children's program? Surely him posing as an old woman to see his kids would be on the 6 o' clock news. He got caught at the end.
19	** Why couldn't they have him do that? And why would it be on the news?
20	*** Let's see, you have a father posing as a nanny in order to see his kids. There were people who witnessed an "elderly woman" saving a guy from choking by performing the Heimlich manoeuvre, causing her mask to fall off. Yelp, totally not newsworthy.
21	*** This was years before camera phones existed, so nothing could be shown. I doubt the restaurant wanted to bring that kind of publicity to itself and wouldn't publicize it. Nor would many people dining feel that it was something especially newsworthy except an exceptionally strange family argument. On the surface, there was nothing illegal about anything that happened there, unless Miranda wanted to press charges against Daniel for violating their custody arrangement, which she was too shocked to do at the time. And how often do you hear about custody disputes on the news, unless they involve celebrities or kidnapping/murder?
22	*** Nothing illegal? I'd say spiking someone's food with something you know they're allergic to is pretty damn illegal. Even if Stu hadn't choked--which was admittedly somewhat unexpected--consuming allergens can easily land a person in the hospital and can even be deadly. He deliberately tried to make Stu sick, and whether he intended to or not, did objectively endanger Stu's life.
23	*** IIRC, Daniel never actually confessed to spiking Stu's food. He says "Oh God, I killed the bastard", but he only mutters it to himself. As far as anyone knows, something accidentally went wrong in the kitchen and Daniel had nothing to do with it.
24	* Miranda says they have nothing in common, and I agree with her. Daniel is a clownish immature guy, and Miranda is a serious mature woman. Here's the headscratcher... if they have nothing in common, why the heck did she marry him, and have his kids? She would have broken it off with him on the first date. I'm surprised their relationship lasted that long.
25	** Explained in-story. Miranda fell in love with Daniel because he was so funny and carefree, which balanced out her strictness. However, over time, the charm wore off and their differences became more pronounced. It's a pretty realistic look at the whole "opposites attract" thing.
26	** Furthermore, Miranda became a lot more responsible as their relationship progressed while Daniel remained a ManChild. She fully embraced parenthood and became 100% committed to working hard to provide for her family. Daniel, on the other hand, is shown to have never truly committed to acting his age, instead treating married life and fatherhood as a game and never learning from his mistakes. The party he threw signalled to Miranda that he was ''never'' going to learn, and that his immaturity was now ruining her life. She had given him enough second chances to grow up and take their relationship seriously, and, devoid of hope, decided that divorce was the only option.
27	* Not like it really matters to the story all that much, but I wonder if Lydia and Chris were aware of the fact that Daniel had both the dinner date with the family, as well as the business dinner with Lundy. Seems like something he might've let them in on.
28	** It's possible that Daniel was under so much pressure himself that he figured that having to account for the schedule conflict might have caused Chris and Lydia to inadvertently give Daniel away in the heat of the moment.
29	** From the looks on the kids' faces while they watch their father's comings and goings, they seem as confused as everyone else, so it doesn't seem Daniel let them in on the other side of his evening's plans.
30	* What happened after the reveal at the restaurant? Did he resume his dinner with Lundy? Surely Lundy must have witnessed it all and yet he still decided to give Daniel his own show?
31	** Lundy was desperate to have a hit show so he probably didn't care about Daniel's personal life so long as he kept kids entertained and the network's ratings up.
32	** By that moment Daniel has already shown himself as Mrs. Doubtfire and explained that he intended to make her the host of the new show (after accidentally showing up at his table in disguise, but managing to convince Lundy that was his plan all along). So Lundy just saw that Daniel saved a man from choking and ended in a fight with the woman. If Daniel said something like "She is my ex-wife", Lundy probably wouldn't press for more information and continue their dinner.
33	** As for “what happened next,” a deleted scene shows Daniel, still in his Doubtfire garb, arriving back at Steiner Street in a taxi to speak with Miranda
34	* How come Daniel was mindful enough to fabricate a professional background for his nanny persona prior to his phone interview with Miranda but had to improvise a name when asked?
35	** He didn't think that far ahead. He was so focused on sounding credible to Miranda that he didn't bother to think of a name until the last second.
36	* Stu, played as an Englishman by Pierce Brosnan, asks Mrs. Doubtfire "What part of England do you come from?" even though anybody from the British Isles would know she is speaking with a Scottish accent.
37	** He was low-key grilling Effie because he thought her accent sounded fake, but not fake enough to be like THIS IS A FRAUD!
38	*** Or he could just be curious as people who moved around different regions of a country often assimilate parts of that accent unintentionally. My grandma knew a German woman who assimilated several parts of a London accent, then several words from a Geordie dialect, but instead of saying whey aye (of course) she said Vy aye.
39	** Mrs Doubtfire explicitly tells Miranda she is from England, so if Miranda told Stu this then he probably took it as read. An out-of-universe explanation is that England is sometimes conflated with Great Britain, particularly in American media (in fact, this occurs near the end of the movie in the show-within-a-film, where England is inaccurately described as an island). No one raising the inconsistency of Doubtfire’s English origin with her Scottish accent might therefore be due to a mistake on the part of the writers.
40	** Daniel seems to realize that his accent is one he's essentially invented--when Stu presses him further about it, he (as Mrs. Doubtfire) stammers out that she's moved house many times in her life, which explains why "her" accent is so inconsistent. Like the above poster said, Stu probably assumes that she's picked up several cues from different accents (as [[Theatre/{{Pygmalion}} Henry Higgins]] would happily tell you, accents are an important part in British culture).
41	* Why in the world would Daniel, while babysitting the kids in his Mrs. Doubtfire disguise, pee while standing up? He was just ''asking'' to get busted.
42	** He had become complacent and forgot that it was no longer his house so he neglected to lock the door.
43	** Have you ever opened the door (or stall door) to a public bathroom only to see that it is already occupied by someone who didn't bother to lock it? I have. Apparently, some people just don't bother to lock bathroom doors, at home or in public.
44	** It goes beyond just not wanting to be accidentally walked in on. If you saw your old British housekeeper walk into the bathroom and then heard the distinct splash of piss hitting the water from some distance, you would immediately recognize it as the sound of a person who pees standing up. Why risk any of them putting two and two together?
45	* One of the women Miranda and her kids interview as a housekeeper (to replace Mrs. Doubtfire) near the end of the film says she can't do any cleaning or cooking or babysitting whatsoever (she even mentions she can't change diapers at one point). So what could she have done if they hired her?
46	** Nothing. That was what made it so funny.
47	** Basically she figured her job would be to sit around and call an ambulance if any of the kids started dying. Otherwise she was completely uninterested in actually working, thus showing exactly how lucky they'd been to have their previous nanny.
48	* I just thought of this, but why didn't Daniel/Mrs. Doubtfire just call Miranda and tell her she was too sick to go to Bridges that Friday night? That way Daniel could've met Mr Lundy and he wouldn't have had to deal with the hassle of switching the two roles.
49	** Because Miranda already put the guilt trip on him and would have done so again if he tried to get out of it again. Also the littlest child had pleaded with Mrs. Doubtfire to come and Daniel's driving force in life is to not disappoint his kids.
50	* How did Miranda get Daniel "hired" as his kids nanny at the end? The supervision ruling was ordered by the judge, not Miranda, so unless she went to the Judge afterwards and got it overturned in record time, she is violating a court order.
51	** That's exactly what she did and it's even briefly confirmed in the family discussion at the end.
52	* Didn't Daniel risk his job as Mrs. Doubtfire at first when he threw the remote control into the aquarium because Lydia didn't obey him? Lydia, Chris and Natalie could have told Miranda that the new nanny had ruined the remote and Miranda could have fired him for destroying her property!
53	** He most likely took the remote out of the aquarium after the end of the scene, dried it, tested to see if it worked (it likely still did) and then hid it. But he did that to distance his Mrs. Doubtfire character from himself; doing that made her look very strict to his children, and they'd be less likely to realize that she's their father in disguise. I mean, they also could have told their mother that she made them do housework. But they were so impressed by "her" exceptional cooking and were so pleased to see that their mother was truly happy for the first time in years that they probably thought "OK, our nanny is very strict, but Mom's happy, so let's keep her strictness a secret." And, as time went on, Daniel significantly toned down the character's strictness, so they had no further reason to bring it up.
54	* After Miranda informed Mrs. Sellner that Daniel didn't have a sister, what was Daniel planning to do the next time Mrs. Sellner came to check his apartment? How was he going to explain about the woman who claimed to be his sister once Miranda told her that Daniel didn't have any?
55	** Probably make up another story about how he really "does" have a sister but that she isn't really a sister, just an obscure relation that is referred to as a sister. Like the actor playing him, Daniel seems to be very good at improvising.
56	* Why does Stuart believe that Daniel is an idiot? It's perfectly clear that Daniel may be an immature man, but he does love his children and cares for them.
57	** Because Miranda has told Stu about every idiotic and childish thing Daniel did when they were married.
58	** This is also common with couples that are divorced, more so with a nasty divorce. Stuart had never met Daniel and he is only hearing second hand references from Miranda. He trusts Miranda's point of view more than the children as children typically only see the good in their parents.
59	** When did Stu call him an idiot? The word I remember is "loser." Which is closer to the mark, given how irresponsible Daniel is and that he's chronically unemployed.
60	* How could Miranda, who has been married to Daniel for the better part of two decades, not recognize ANY of the voices on the phone as belonging to her ex-husband? She must have heard him workshop hundreds of crazy voices and sophomoric situations over the course of their marriage and not one of the absolutely outlandish calls rang any alarm bells as her man-child ex-husband playing an elaborate prank?
61	** I'd say it's considerably stranger that Miranda didn't instantly suspect Mrs. Doubtfire of being a disguised Daniel when he brought up Stuart Little when speaking to Natalie. I mean, it is literally Natalie's favorite book, not just any old book she likes, and Daniel knows this, so for her to bring it up out of the blue should have set off an alarm in Miranda's head. And then, of course, Chris saying she's "big for a lady", Mrs. Doubtfire suggesting Daniel babysit the children, and the fact that she knows where everything is in the kitchen, should have confirmed that initial suspicion to her. But there was never any suspicion to begin with, which perhaps indicates that Miranda is simply very gullible and desperate.
62	** You're forgetting that Daniel is displaying an unbelievable level of self-control. This is the guy who keeps randomly quitting jobs and putting on stupid stunts like secret parties that Miranda isn't supposed to know about when it's ''pretty dang obvious'' that's she's going to find out. (Even if she hadn't come home early, could Daniel really have taken down all the decorations in time?) The idea that Daniel could pull off a sustained, long-term scheme like this is unthinkable to her. And that, in fact, is the point. Daniel is so passionate about staying in contact with his kids that he manages to actually focus and get something done for once, first by setting up the scheme and later by sustaining it (by learning to cook, for instance). Miranda doesn't think Daniel is capable of all that. Don't forget that the scheme itself is ''really'' out of left field; when was the last time ''you'' suspected that an elderly British woman was actually a middle-aged man in disguise?? The reality is so bizarre, on multiple levels, that it's no wonder that Miranda doesn't catch on.
63	* Exactly what was the network planning to do once the word got out that the sweet little old lady on a Mr. Rogers or Lamp Chop's Play-Along-like program was really a man? This was the 90s and the "think of the children!!!" mindset was EXTREMELY present as far as censorship in children's TV programming by conservative thinkers was concerned. I doubt the network heads could keep the secret from every cameraman, scriptwriter, special guest, puppeteer. and anyone else involved in the production of the show. All it would take is one well-timed photograph sent to the six o'clock news and both Daniel plus the studio would be ruined.
64	** Who needs a photo or anyone to spill, he'd be credited in the show itself. I doubt many people would get that worked up over an actor playing a character. If anyone questions it they can just respond that Daniel is the only one who can do the voice and it's easier to keep her look consistent if it's entirely makeup. It's not like he's still pretending she's a real person anymore.
65	** It's possible there was some controversy in the beginning, but Danny's boss stood by him and eventually people decided it was a good show and the public just moved on.
66	** Also possible it's played off as a comedy bit, remember Bosom Buddies and Some Like it Hot did exist - so long as Daniel keeps it clean, he can point out it's just a role.
67	** It wouldn't be a secret anyway considering Daniel's name would've been on the credits.
68	** Interestingly enough, both programs the original poster mentioned featured CrossdressingVoices: Fred Rogers voiced Lady Elaine Fairchilde on ''Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood'', while Shari Lewis performed both Charlie Horse and Hush Puppy on ''Lamb Chop's Play-Along.'' Granted, they were doing voice work and not full performances, but a children's television producer could easily argue that Daniel's role as Mrs. Doubtfire was just a further extension of a trend that was already happening in 90s kids' shows.
69	** Daniel was playing a character he created. He wasn't hiding his identity as Mrs. Doubtfire. In fact, it was popular enough he had probably been interviewed out of character on other shows on the station Lundy owns. Now if the public found out that the character began as an insane ploy to fool his ex-wife, it may have caused problems. But by this point, Miranda and Daniel have reached an understanding and were on good terms. She would have been pleased her children's father had finally developed some responsibility and had a steady job. Miranda would have no desire to damage that by bringing up his disguise ploy.
70	* The judge near the end refers to Daniel's having convinced people he was a sixty-year-old woman. SIXTY? To me at least, Mrs. Doubtfire looked and acted closer to 75, if not older.
71	** Some of her mannerisms might indicate that she's closer to 75, but her physical health is still pretty great. (She handles four flights of stairs without trouble). So it's easy to see how you might think that she's 60. Anyway, Danny probably made contradictory claims to different people. The judge is just picking one particular number out of the crowd.

Context Headscratchers / MrsDoubtfire