What Women Want (2001, DVD)

Sometimes you must judge a movie solely by the "feel-good" factor, a percent of averages. Allow me to include a little bit of stereotypical thinking here and when you roll your eyes, keep in mind that I have a right to my fantasy in reviewing What Women Want, directed by Nancy Meyers.

Mel Gibson as Nick Marshall is a steak dinner with tiny red potatoes, dripping in Au Jus gravy. Mel Gibson is eye-candy, stomach-candy, and diabetically drippingly sweet-candy to my eyes. I'm not asking for forgiveness for being a stereotypical woman. I'm just asking for seconds.

Gazing at Mel rolling a tube of lipstick over his lips, a towel wrapped around his waist and a leg slung over a kitchen sink as he lathers himself with wax was Smorgasbord Heaven for me.

Part parody, part wannabe love-story featuring a chauvinistic man who can hear the thoughts of all woman aloud and gets "enlightened" (in more ways than one), I found myself giggling during the first twenty minutes of the film.

Giggling..oh my, was that me? I looked around. Yep, that was me, alright. Here's one of my favorite pieces of eye-candy, dancing in a towel to one of my favorite songs:

I'm a B*tch, I'm a Mother, I'm a Child, I'm a Lover, I'm a Sinner, I'm a saint*...

Oh yeah, baby.. dance for me, Puppet Boy, I thought, as I shoved more low-fat content popcorn in my mouth.

As with any fantasy, there is that rude awakening, that buzzer that sounds that the round is over and sorry Ms. Hunt..you ARE the weakest link.

The Premise

Mel's a chauvinistic, successful, Ad Agency guru with the attitude, the house, the girlfriends and the charm. An unnecessary but fun prelude to the movie shows a boyish Mel growing up in Vegas, son to a successfully shapely Vegas Show girl. While other boys are flying kites and torturing toads, Mel basks backstage in Vegas with beautiful show girls showing him their motherly side. This prelude was about as necessary to the shaping of the plot as Mel's future support bra, but was entertaining nonetheless.

Alan Alda, as the President of the firm, does a respectable but boring job as Mel's superior, the man responsible for hiring Darcy to turn the Agency around. Perhaps too many years of *M*A*S*H* left me hoping the Producers might give Alda a few challenging lines. Yet Alda is just one tube of smeared, runny lipstick in a script that made me want to shout "Can I just look at Mel..can we turn the sound off please? And can Helen Hunt PLEASE go back to the tanning salon..I think she missed a millimeter?"

Enter Helen Hunt as Darcy McGuire, a successful advertising mogul who knows how to bring in the female 16-24 age group, the highest paying sector of the advertising market today. Helen arrives on the scene and takes away the Creative Director position that Mel and his two assistants felt he had "in the bag."

Cameo roles by Delta Burke and Valerie Perrigine as the two assistants were not only useless, but an embarrassment to women, actors, actresses and, hell, the entire Movie Industry at once. Did Mel owe them a favor? I never ever cared for Delta Burke, but I remember having some fond moments watching Valerie over the years.

Helen Hunt as Darcy assigns each employee a pink box filled with woman's items, such as lipstick, leg wax, a Wonder Bra, mascara, and other sundries. Mel takes the pink box and analyzes the contents, partially nude, looking quite delightful IMO. Let me reiterate that I found it delightful watching Mel in a towel, smoking a cigarette, applying the mascara wand and swaying his hips. Isn't part of the joy of an illicit dessert watching how the syrup drips down the edges of the vanilla ice cream while you lick your lips anticipating the flavor? Mel makes me lick my lips. I don't think I'd ever have to plead an Ice Cream headache.

What's the magical way that Mel is able to hear woman's thoughts aloud? Here's where the script begins to run like a Slightly Irregular pair of Leggs pantyhose.

A household accident involving a bathtub and a hair dryer partially electrocutes Mel, and brings on the miracle of sound, enabling Mel to hear woman's thoughts. ALL of woman's thoughts, including the sexual rating of date Marisa Tomei, a coffee shop, wanna be actress that has a fling with almighty Mel. In a play on words back in the shop, Mel refers to his sexual prowess as "El Grande" (but of course, he was talking about his cappuccino. One of the first "thoughts" that he overhears as he attempts to seduce the delightful Ms. Tomei is "Oops..he lied about the Grande". I could hear the silent chuckle of millions of women and felt the inner wincing of millions of men at this one line, perhaps the funniest line in a movie where the script went somewhere South of The Border right after Mel put the towel back on the rack.
What starts out as amusing and fun in the first thirty minutes gets ruined by the relationship between Hunt and Gibson. The action stops. The giggles stopped. I found myself glancing at the wall clock one too many times and wishing with all my heart that Squinty Helen and her squinty lines would have stayed somewhere in Squinty Land.

What a Girl Wants

Would I recommend "What Women Want"? It pains me as much as a bikini wax to say an emphatic No.

Unless you can somehow get a copy of the first twenty minutes with Mel, in his towel, dancing to "B*tch".
Now that...was b*tchin...

Toss away the rest of the film with the ripped pantyhose and cold Mocha Grande. In the words of Marisa Tomei..."They lied about the Grande." Even a good soundtrack featuring a few interludes by Sinatra can't save the day. There is no love story or Awakening here, just a cold cup of sugarless coffee that needed a few more hours of brewing.

Pass on this one, unless you really want to be bored during the last hour of the film. Or rent it and watch the first twenty or thirty minutes, then turn it off and go and have yourself some dessert, some good conversation or a meaningful fantasy about Mel in your makeup, dancing around in your bathroom.

That's what This Woman Wants, anyway.

*Lyrics to song *B*tch* by Meredith Brooks