Writing a review of What Women Want has been on my to-do list for more than a week – I saw the Mel Gibson release on opening afternoon with a nearly sold-out crowd and have slowly been forgetting its contents ever since. It doesn’t help that it was one of those days when I’d remembered to bring my handy film-critic notebook but somehow misplaced my pen. So whatever witty, urbane observations I might have made long since have fallen by the wayside, and I’m left only with the vaguest memories of the movie I sat through.
But I have my advisor status back, if just for the next give-or-take 30 days, so I figured I might as well drop 600 or 800 words on our nation’s number-two movie this holiday season. So here goes – What Women Want is this year’s shameless misogyny comedy throwback, an old-school gender-relations film with about as much bite as a pre-Polident June Alyson. That it was co-written by two women is a surprise; that it was helmed by the director of the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap isn’t.
I’m being a little unfair, though – sometimes a movie with absolutely no edge can still be pretty funny. What Women Want has a can’t-lose premise, and it cashes in on it a couple dozen times. The second act is a keeper, but the opening and closing acts are both tepid and almost completely devoid of laughs. Even as the credits roll, and a female narrator tells the story of the Gibson character (an orphan raised by strippers, it seems, who has since grown up to become seemingly irresistible to women of all ages, shapes and sizes), you might think you’re in over your head. The movie immediately postures itself as a parody-slash-homage to Eisenhower-era bachelor movies like How to Murder Your Wife and The Apartment, minus much of their politically incorrect charm.
Gibson, like Nicolas Cage in the opening of The Family Man, seems to have the perfect single man’s life – a string of prospects, a well-paying job (at that staple workplace of movie bachelorhood, the ad agency) and a level-headed teenage daughter. Okay, so the daughter and her icy-hearted mom (Lauren Holly) both hate his guts, but at least his boss is the stereotypically male and smarmy Alan Alda. A guy could do worse.
So we see Mel stroll through his workplace and exchange superficial pleasantries and flirtations with every woman in his path, and even the bitter chick (Marisa Tomei) in the coffee shop seems to get into it a little. All is well until Alda sits him down and breaks the news – Mel’s not getting the promotion to creative director. No, it’s a changing marketplace, and young women are the hottest demographic. Who would be better-suited to sell tampons, perfume and feminine hygiene products, him or Oscar darling Helen Hunt?
Why, Helen, of course, and she’s introduced as the “bitch on wheels” stereotype even though she never seems less than three-dimensional, approachable and human. I guess it’s not in Hunt’s acting oeuvre to appear cold-hearted, but that doesn’t stop Mel from making her into a mortal enemy. And, after a contrived but admittedly funny sequence that leaves a drunken Gibson suffering electric shock in his bathroom, he wakes up with the perfect weapon – the ability to hear the thoughts from inside every woman’s head.
It takes Mel some time to realize that this is indeed an enviable situation to be in, not some kind of “Twilight Zone” curse to leave a man shaking his head and moaning, “Why me? I didn’t ask to be the ambassador of estrogen!” As he quickly learns, a man wanting to take advantage of the opposite sex can mine those inner thoughts and play directly to them, whether it’s in the context of his advertising job or simply with the goal of getting laid.
Like I said, it’s a can’t-lose premise, but even when Mel seems like a heartless bastard, What Women Want can’t bring itself to sink to the moral-satire depths of a brutal film like In the Company of Men. Nor does it ever get too carefree and slapsticky – there are always a couple of serious subplots lurking. The first involves Mel’s daughter, a wisecracking sitcom teen who plans to lose her virginity to her much-older boyfriend on prom night. The second, and the infinitely more treacly one, involves a mousy woman at work whose thoughts always run along the lines of, “Who even notices me? No one would miss me if I were gone. I should just jump out that window over there.” Both are resolved in shamefully manipulative ways, and both keep me from recommending the movie as a whole.
Then there’s the inevitable romance side of the movie. Gibson starts things off with a conquest of Tomei, whose head turns out to be a veritable fruit basket of dysfunction, but quickly switches to the workplace connection he can’t avoid, Miss Helen Hunt. If that woman can ever enter a fully healthy relationship in a film, I’ll be just as surprised as she is, but it appears she’s doomed to the likes of geriatric mental cases (As Good as it Gets), depressive burn victims (Pay it Forward) and men who end up marooned on desert islands (Cast Away). Damn. We’re still rooting for you, Helen.
Okay, so I guess I do remember enough about this movie to write a full review of it – I just had to tap into my wounded subconscious to retrieve the information. What Women Want is already making its steady decline down the box-office charts (its second weekend held a 51% drop-off in ticket sales), but it’s destined to cross the $100 million mark on star-power alone. And because it’s so safe and accessible that any family could take their kids to it and not worry about them being warped like a record left on the car dashboard in mid-July.
The movie would have been infinitely better with some genuine, healthy satire, not just predictable softball humor, or just by going over the top, but this generational throwback takes itself seriously. And that’s what makes it so forgettable and mundane.
An accident leaves a normal man with the ability to hear what women are truly thinking. This insight into the female psyche provides amusement for the...More at HotMovieSale.com
Product DetailsOriginal Title:What Women WantActors: Alan Alda - Ashley Johnson - Helen Hunt - Marisa Tomei - Mark Feuerstein - Mel GibsonCondition: ...More at iNetVideo.com
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