The Associate

WORKING GIRL for the '90s, a too-nice comedy about triumphing over workplace adversity. There's funny stuff here, but it's undermined by humor that's genial when it should be razor-sharp, and crudely farcical when it needs to be cruelly understated. Whoopi Goldberg plays Laurel Ayres, an investment broker who ignores the glass ceiling until she whacks her head on it. She starts her own firm, works like a drone and can't get arrested until she invents a partner, a mysterious old white guy named Robert Cutty. Naturally, everyone wants to meet the man behind the brilliant insights, and Laurel's attempts to keep her non-existent associate out of sight get her into eve...