Film

The $64 Million Question

What Women Want is Mel Gibson in Pantyhose

by Traci Vogel

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Smell Of Steve, INC.

LET'S PLAY a game. Pretend you're a woman; I'll pretend, too. Can you feel the ambidextrous brain halves, the extra cushion of body fat, the sudden realization that the consumer market is the only place you can exert "political" power? Okay, good. Now, ask yourself, "What do I want?" Put aside that men are never asked, "No, what do you really want?"--their desires are as clear and arrow-straight as logic in the unfiltered light of Robin Hood's wood--and concentrate. What do you want?

When Freud asked this question of women many years ago, he posed it as a psychological conundrum, and a condescending one. What Women Want, the movie, poses the question as an advertising conundrum--and (act surprised here!)--an equally condescending one.

Mel Gibson, playing high-level advertising exec Nick Marshall, gets tripped up in his slick 'n' chauvinistic act when, instead of being handed the promotion he expects, a woman (Helen Hunt as Darcy McGuire) is hired in his place. His boss, Dan (Alan Alda, in a nice twist on his "sensitive guy" rep), explains that "it's a women's world"--women are the target market these days, and Nick, that little devil, while he can get all the women he wants, doesn't "get" women. So Ms. McGuire comes on board, and as an introduction she hands out pink boxes of "chick stuff"--pantyhose, push-up bras, hair mousse, nail polish, waxing kits--and asks the staff to produce ideas for targeting women. Rolling his eyes, Nick heads woefully home, gets drunk, tries on the pantyhose, mousses his hair, and while blow-drying falls in the tub and electrocutes himself.

The next thing he knows, it's morning, he's face down on the bathroom floor, and his sassy Latina maid is grumbling more than usual about having to clean and get him a bagel. But the thing is, the maid's only thinking these passive-aggressive things. And suddenly Nick is in the best position to know what women want--he can hear their very thoughts.

So far, director Nancy Meyers has a juicy little nugget of a story: one that, at least in the previews, promises to mine the gender wars for the golden banter we expect from comedies in the vein of Hepburn and Tracy. Unfortunately, Meyers doesn't shoot that high. Instead, What Women Want relies on the Hollywood cliché as punch line, a formula that's good for a few laughs, but is even better for some truly offensive stereotypes.

What women think about, and what they want, in What Women Want is calories (want to be thinner), ass (wanna get me some), career (want to come off as self-assured), and respect (if I don't get some, want to kill myself--literally). Darcy McGuire, the highly successful woman with whom female audience members are supposed to identify, wants nothing more than these things, and has no deeper thought than astonishment at Nick's sudden sensitivity and his consequent sex appeal. Okay, this is a Hollywood comedy. No one should expect incredible insight. But in a woman-directed, partially woman-scripted film, with a theoretically strong female cast, can't we at least expect some gratifying cleverness?

The downfall of What Women Want is that it follows what would probably be the advice of its fictional advertising company: It isn't too aggressive; it hits the easy marks; and it is designed to appeal to a broad (no pun intended, please) audience. It succeeds in these things; audience members at the screening I viewed gleefully predicted plot twists and practically chanted punch lines along with the script. They screamed in laughter when Nick tried to wax his legs and exclaimed, "Women are crazy!" There is a revengeful pleasure in watching an action film star dress himself up in the prickly accessories of sexism--especially one as hirsute with machismo as Mel Gibson. But no new bulwark in the gender wars is won here. Darcy, smart enough to be courted by a New York advertising agency, is too stupid to realize that if Nick is coming up with exactly the same ideas as her, he might--somehow--be cheating. The basic conceit of Nick's mind-reading is, insultingly, that women can't verbalize what they truly want. Even more maddeningly, having gone through estrogen hell, Nick gets to save everyone at the end, including, in a truly reprehensible subplot, the wanly suicidal office assistant.

We're living in a culture that offers women fake power--the power to determine what products are created and consumed--and one can hardly blame Nancy Meyers for taking the low road and producing a flat, stale, and probably extremely profitable Hollywood film. As for what women want, if you're going to ask, be prepared to listen. For a while. Might as well get yourself a drink.