To its credit, The Associate never becomes fixated on Whoopi Goldberg's race, identifying her gender as the source of her exclusion from the giant gentleman's club that is Wall Street. This makes Goldberg what, by 1996, she undoubtedly preferred -- just a popular female actress, who can be divorced from her racial identity when it suits the story. But there aren't too many other surprises contained in The Associate, an amiable but unremarkable farce about how a woman creates an imaginary male partner in order to lend legitimacy to her own sterling business ideas. Donald Petrie's film has some smart comments to make about the business world, and Goldberg is mostly convincing, outside of several moments of sass that undercut the credible businesswoman she's trying to show the world she is. What the viewer must accept is that Wall Street would go crazy over a phantom business entity whom no one has ever met, a ruse so fragile that it would crumble under the slightest poking from an investigative journalist. (And what a poor casting choice for that intrepid reporter role -- big-haired fiftysomething Noo Yawker Cindy Mason [Lainie Kazan], who walks around grotesquely dangling a cigarette, seeming like a total finance novice). But most farces rely on such suspension of disbelief, and the film actually takes flight when Goldberg dons her Robert Cutty outfit -- a Marlon Brando mask applied convincingly enough to make her look like a real, if slightly mummified, white man. Dianne Wiest is at her perky best as Goldberg's assistant, and when these two over-40 women take the market by storm, it's a nice goose of populist feminism.