Taglines: He has the power to hear everything women are thinking. Finally… a man is listening.
A man finds himself getting an unexpected crash course in the psychology of contemporary women in this romantic comedy. Nick Marshall (Mel Gibson) is a successful advertising executive living in Chicago who has long fancied himself a ladies’ man, though he has precious little understanding of women beyond figuring out how to seduce them. One day, Nick receives a substantial electric shock in an accident in his bathroom; while he’s not seriously injured, when he comes to, he discovers something remarkable has happened — he can suddenly hear what women are thinking.
At first, Nick finds himself learning all sorts of things he didn’t want to know, but he also realizes how this can be used to his advantage — especially after his old boss, Dan Wanamaker (Alan Alda) is replaced by a woman, Darcy Maguire (Helen Hunt). But Nick begins to feel differently about his unusual gift when he discovers Darcy is infatuated with him, and he finds himself falling for her. What Women Want also features Bette Midler as Nick’s analyst, Delta Burke and Valerie Perrine as two of his co-workers, and Marisa Tomei as one of Nick’s significant others.
What Women Want is a 2000 American romantic fantasy comedy film written by Josh Goldsmith, Cathy Yuspa, and Diane Drake, directed by Nancy Meyers, and starring Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt. The film was a box office success, with a North American domestic gross of $182 million and a worldwide gross of $374 million against a budget of $70 million.
Film Review for What Women Want
…Is A Good Seeing-To. That traditional male reply to Freud’s famous question turns out to be a significant part of the answer proposed by this Mel Gibson rom-com, with its incidental emphasis on a considerate, intelligent response to a woman’s needs in the bedroom department. At any rate, both Sigmund’s question and Mel’s movie assume that what men want is clear and unproblematic – that’s not a mystery. Is it?
Produced and directed by Nancy Meyers (an industry veteran and author of Private Benjamin, but a relative newcomer to the director’s chair), this is a genial, reasonably entertaining date movie about Nick, an ageing, defiantly non-PC ladies’ man, played by Gibson, whose bedpost is a veritable forest of notches. He’s an ad exec, specialising in campaigns featuring attractive young women in thongs, a swingin’ kind of guy who plays Frank Sinatra records in his apartment.
But his world is inverted, in the time-honoured manner, by a woman. Gibson’s boss, worldly Alan Alda, tells him that women are making the buying decisions nowadays, and therefore he is being passed over for the creative director’s job in favour of someone who can intuit female consumers’ desires: the ubiquitous Helen Hunt, here in professional glam mode, but, as ever, trading on what Hollywood sees as her non-threatening ordinariness.
Struggling to get his head round the whole woman thing, Mel is accidentally electrocuted in his bathroom and subsequently discovers that he has the ability to hear what women are thinking: he is Empathy Man with X-Ray Hearing, and uses his superpowers to undermine Helen in the office and ratchet up his already sky-high strike rate with the ladies.
This might have been more interesting, and certainly more daring, if it had been ambiguous: if we could never be sure if Nick can really hear what women are thinking, or if it is just a kind of paranoid psychosis – which would explain why all the remarks he hears are superficially embarrassing, but fundamentally flattering.
The film’s unspoken premise is that we always know what Mel wants: we don’t need weird powers to know what he is thinking. With adorably candid Mel, what you’ve got on the label is what you’ve got in the can. It’s just these pesky women who are so sphinx-like. But this is the ultimate seduction. In getting inside their heads, instead of just their pants, Mel is enjoying a bit of The Other in a very real sense.
What Women Want could have been an exquisitely nasty black comedy – something that Neil LaBute might have directed. But, naturally, something that makes Mel look like a bad guy is out of the question. From the outset, it is made crystal clear that he is supposed to be lovable. His character is similar in some ways to Nicolas Cage’s in The Family Man: a shallow lothario in need of a woman’s redemptive presence. But that film, however execrable, was sharper and tougher on the boorishness of the single professional good-time guy.
In this, Mel is just a doll. When he wakes up of a morning, he playfully slaps his maid’s bum, while she chuckles indulgently. When he overhears women thinking about him, it is all pretty complimentary stuff. For example, he never hears anyone think: “Jesus, look at the dye-job on that.”
On getting Marisa Tomei into bed, he is momentarily put off his rhythm by hearing her think his pork truncheon is not quite as massive as she’d like – oo-er! – but nevertheless uses his powers to hear what women really want in bed, and their congress ends with her gasping what a total love machine he is. (Incidentally, the film primly withholds the details, but Mel starts jabbering to his buddy about how penis envy is nonsense: “Half of them don’t even like them!” It’s a bit of a way from the witty exclamation in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot: “It’s a whole different sex!”)
So what do women want? Well, the idea is given a specifically consumerist slant by Helen’s job as someone hired to figure out what they want in the way of goods and services. But here they turn out to want professional parity with men; and they also want a caring and sensitive partner. And from his 15-year-old daughter by his previous marriage, Mel learns that they want a father who is There For Them. These timeless emotional issues eclipse the fact of women wanting to break through the glass ceiling and take more of the finite number of top jobs available, and the harsher zero-sum realities of this question are passed over in favour of the cuteness of Helen and Mel falling for each other.
What Women Want is a picture that tries to have its cake and eat it by appearing to let Mel cede some of his sexual and professional status to women, and yet remain a 100% successful hunk. But it does this with a certain amount of brio, and a watchable performance from Ashley Johnson as Alex, Mel’s daughter. You could do worse on a Friday night than see this.
What Women Want (2001)
Directed by: Nancy Meyers
Starring: Mel Gibson, Helen Hunt, Marisa Tomei, Alan Alda, Ashley Johnson, Lauren Holly, Valerie Perrine, Judy Greer, Delta Burke, Sarah Paulson, Diana Maria Riva
Screenplay by: Josh Goldsmith, Cathy Yuspa
Production Design by: Jon Hutman
Cinematography by: Dean Cundey
Film Editing by: Thomas J. Nordberg, Stephen A. Rotter
Costume Design by: Ellen Mirojnick
Set Decoration by: Rosemary Brandenburg
Music by: Alan Silvestri
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content and language.
Ristributed by: Paramount Pictures
Release Date: February 2, 2001
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