Like us, the other characters assent gladly and immediately to this curious fabrication, as if she has fulfilled for them some previously unsuspected archetype of womanhood. This is part of the pleasure of the movie: Miranda’s readiness to confide in Mrs. Doubtfire; the instinctive trust and obedience of the children; the eagerness of Mrs. Sellner, the grim-faced court liaison, to be enchanted by her. And then there’s the bus driver … The bus pulls over, the door opens, and Mrs. Doubtfire groans under her breath as she recognizes the driver, a pre-retiree to whose antique harassments she has already been subjected. I love this shameless old bus driver, with his pitted Bukowski face and silver-nicotine hair. “Well, my lady!” he says as she hauls herself up the steps. “It’s a pleasure to see you again!” Mrs. D sits down heavily and exhales, and we feel the weight of her long day of (fake) womanhood. But the bus driver is still staring at her, turned around in his seat and giving slow, happy blinks of deep-sea lechery. Her stockings have given way—slumped down to expose a bestially hairy Robin Williams knee. “I like that Mediterranean look in women,” the bus driver says. “Natural. Healthy. Just the way God made ya.”

But Mrs. Doubtfire’s secret, the thing that authenticates her, is grief. The grief of a father legally deprived of his children and communicating with them through layers of latex and padding; the grief of a man of many voices, a polyphonic virtuoso, whose mania can rest only when it occupies the persona of an artificial woman. Daniel Hillard is a riff on Robin Williams the comic, the clown: a revved-up antic Hamlet blipping and zinging between ideas. Mrs. Doubtfire, by contrast, is the imago of stability. Embedded in her upholstery, hidden in her bra, Daniel can at last be strong, compassionate, wise.

Contrary to expectation, the movie does not end with Mom and Dad getting back together. But Mrs. Doubtfire herself floats blissfully and profoundly free of the circumstances of her creation. His masquerade over, defrocked (as it were) and discovered, Daniel pitches a children’s TV show to a network chief, with himself-as-Doubtfire as the host. She has ascended to the realm of pure fiction, but she is more real than ever. We see her at work in the studio, in her grandmaternal armchair, bantering with a monkey puppet named Kovacs. The mailman arrives with a letter. One of her viewers has written in, worried and sad in the wake of her parents’ separation: “Did I lose my family?” Mrs. Doubtfire reads the letter aloud and then looks into the camera. She speaks lovely, condolent, reassuring words. “If there’s love, dear,” she says, “those are the ties that bind, and you’ll have a family in your heart forever.” Her gentleness is immeasurable. This is where I cry on the airplane. “All my love to you, poppet. You’re going to be all right.”