What Women Want

After all this time, most directors haven’t grasped one simple fact: comedies should not run much over 90 minutes. There are exceptions, of course, but for the most part, when you exceed this magical interval, things begin to drag, and what seemed funny an hour ago is now just tiresome. Nancy Meyers, the director of “What Women Want” clearly needs to be reminded of this fact, because she takes what should have been a breezy hour and a half and stretches it out to an ultimately tedious 127 minutes. I mention this by way of comparison, because it clocks in at eight minutes longer than the captivating “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” which told numerous stories laden with action and historical import in the time “What Women Want” takes to depict two days in the lives of a few rather shallow people. The conceit of “What Women Want” is amusing enough on the face of it. Nick Marshall (Gibson) is an aging Lothario, a “man’s man,” in the words of his ex-wife. He is also a world class chauvinist. By dint of a freak accident, he suddenly acquires the ability to hear women’s thoughts.

In the great tradition of Hollywood redemption, this power ultimately enables him to become in fact the more sensitive, caring man that at first he merely pretended to be. Nick works at a big Chicago ad agency, and he fully expects to be named creative director by his boss Dan (Alda). But Nick is deemed too insensitive to the needs of women consumers (who, we are told repeatedly, are a 40-billion-dollar market, or something like that), and he is passed over in favor of Darcy Maguire (Hunt), who is brought in from another agency. Nick, of course, is perturbed, and when he acquires his newfound skills, resolves to use them to sabotage Darcy and win the job back for himself.

What in fact happens, not exactly surprisingly, is that he falls for Darcy, and she for him. Gibson does a pretty good turn in this comic role, and the scenes where he learns to revel in his new powers have a real charge to them. He is like a kid who just learned how to read and can hardly believe the worlds which are now opened up to him. Gibson even does a passable dance routine early on (channeling Gene Kelly, I suppose), though I found his brief impression of Sean Connery to be funnier. Hunt (who is in just about everything these days) gives an acceptable performance, though she again suffers from an underwritten role. The romance between Nick and Darcy, as well as the domestic tensions between Nick and his daughter Alex, are the movie’s weakest and most predictable elements. Marisa Tomei gives a cute performance in the negligible role of Lola, a coffee shop girl with whom Nick has a fling. Let me add a comment here about product placement. I realize that by now product placement in movies is a fact of life, but this is the first time that I can recall product placement actually serving as a major plot element, if not an actual character.

There is an entire sequence devoted to developing (and showing!) a new ad campaign for Nike, which, of course, is never shown in anything other than a flattering light. Other real-life products are also featured prominently, and I found myself wondering how much these companies had paid for the privilege, which tended to distract me a bit from the movie itself. Obviously it is hard to set a story in an ad agency without some discussion of products, but I think the blatant shilling threatens the credibility of the filmmakers.) “What Women Want” knows the vein of humor it wishes to mine, but there is something slightly unsettling about the spectacle of Nick using his powers to do what he has always done to women, only better. (I fully expect Andrea Dworkin to file suit any minute.) That he finally learns from his experience makes it only slightly less so. (His power, in the end, disappears as mysteriously as it arrived.) Having said that, the writers do concoct a series of amusing moments for Nick, as he wanders through the world of women taking notes on women’s behavior and thoughts, and connecting with them in a way that neither he nor they would have believed possible.

The scenes in which Nick learns what the women around him really think of him are also pretty funny, as is the bit when he learns that his two assistants (Perrine and Burke) actually have no interior life at all. I cannot help but feel, however, that the movie would have been far more effective had the writers abandoned the whole magical mind reading gimmick. They would have lost some of the obvious jokes, but probably gained some better ones, if they had simply depicted a man who, by sheer determination, makes up his mind to learn how women think. (They would also have had to rework the business in which Nick intervenes with the suicidal Erin, which is the one narrative thread that almost carries some emotional weight.) Nick could have shown real growth, not because he fell into a bathtub, but because he recognizes his flaws and resolves to change them. The sequence before the accident, in which Nick tries to “get in touch with his feminine side,” actually has a bigger impact than the mind reading scenes, because it represents a challenge for him. Once he can read women’s minds, there is no challenge for him at all. Of course, they have already made a great movie about a man forcing himself to understand women’s behavior (without the help of magic). It was 1982’s “Tootsie,” and I suggest that you rent it. (12/24/2000)