Dr. T. and the Women

Gee, this must have been a tough offer for Richard Gere to turn down: play a rich, talented doctor, act suave and handsome, surround yourself with a whole bunch of beautiful, talented actresses, and let the chips fall, secure in the knowledge that master director Robert Altman is at the helm. Would that things were so easy. It is unfortunate that more care wasn’t lavished on the script of “Dr. T. and the Women,” because if it had been, we could have avoided wasting what is by any reasonable measure a decent performance by Gere. He plays Dr. Sullivan (Sully) Travis, a Dallas gynecologist with a gold mine practice and a very large house. The waiting room at his well-appointed office is constantly filled to overflowing with his adoring patients, and the estrogen level is at overload. The opening sequence is vintage Altman and actually rather effective, as he scans around the waiting room and reveals the frenzy in caught bits of conversation. Sully thrives on the energy, even when he feels frazzled, ably assisted by his office manager and gal Friday Carolyn (Long, who gives a good comic performance until she is betrayed by an embarrassing twist towards the end). The picture veers off course early on.

The script, by Anne Rapp, never develops a cohesive point of view, and as Sully’s world slowly unravels (along with all of these women in his life) the movie unravels with it. We are left with a confused and directionless series of increasingly unrelated crises. Sully’s wife, Kate (Fawcett, who is effective in a very small role) is losing her mind, his sister-in-law is a lush, his two daughters are frazzled by the impending wedding (not to mention sexual identity crisis) of the eldest. Rapp seems to try harder and harder to less and less effect as the story (such as it is) lurches forward. The picture’s final sequence is a completely bizarre attempt at magical realism. I suppose it is intended to say something about Sully and his place among women, but that is sheer speculation. Instead, it simply confirms the uneasy suspicion that this film lost its way a long time ago. In a conceit that seems precious at best and misogynistic at worst, none of the women who visit Sully actually seem very sick. Rather, they come for the company, or for reassurance that they are still attractive, or maybe just because Dr. T. (as everyone seems to call him) is so darn handsome.

Sully tends to them all with his best mixture of affection and professionalism. Sully professes to worship and understand women, but in fact he is as flummoxed by them as any man. Just as all of the women in his life seem to be going bonkers, Sully meets Bree (Hunt) the new golf pro at his club. To Sully, Bree represents a simpler life. She is straightforward and uncomplicated, and Sully thinks he has fallen in love with her. Hunt, who is great in the current “Pay It Forward,” doesn’t have much to work with here. Indeed, the recurrent motif of “Dr. T. and the Women” is that of excellent performers uniformly wasted in underdeveloped roles. Hunt does a decent job establishing Bree’s persona, but we never understand her as a person. Oddly, the themes of connection and identity that energize Altman’s best films betray him here. One might think that he would have been the perfect director for this movie, that he could take its slapdash elements and whip them into a picaresque vision of a man who is in crisis but doesn’t even know it. But Altman falters here, and perhaps this is not too surprising; even his most successful films ride a fine line between energy and anarchy. One small slip and the jig would be up. In “Dr. T. and the Women” the jig is up almost immediately. (10/30/2000)