hicago advertising exec Nick Marshall (Gibson) has it all. He lives in a seriously
cool, swinging bachelor pad. He's about to get a big promotion to creative director
at his agency. And, best of all, women love him. They're putty in his hands.
It's a perfect life until everything turns upside down in a day.
Nick's teen-age
daughter, staying with him while her newly remarried mother is on her honeymoon,
has no respect for him. "Dad's like an uncle to me," she says. He loses the
creative director job to Darcy Maguire (Hunt) because the agency wants to move
away from bikini-laced beer ads in order to better address the female demographic.
Then Nick learns that women don't really love him at all. In fact, most of
them think he's a jerk.
He learns this after a fateful accident involving a bathtub, a hair dryer and a
large array of women's underwear and grooming aids (don't try this at home, kids)
gives him the ability to read women's minds. Suddenly, it's just as if
they were speaking
out loud. From Lola (Tomei), the counter girl at his favorite coffee shop, to a
French poodle, if she's female, Nick knows just what she's thinking.
Once he gets over the shock, Nick realizes he can make this work for him.
It can boost his romantic success rate as well as help him shoot down Darcy and
get the job that should have been his. But a funny thing starts to happen.
Once Nick is really inside women's heads, he can't help empathizing with them.
He starts to take them seriously, to learn from their perceptions of him.
Nick becomes an all-around better man. Then, as his plan to undermine Darcy
starts to bear fruit, Nick realizes that he's falling in love with her.
A sweet, classy romantic comedy
This is supposedly a film about women and, well, what they want. However, despite
the large female supporting cast, What Women Want is totally Mel Gibson's movie.
Gibson is remarkably appealing as the swinging playboy straight out of the 1960s.
He's no abusive misogynist, just a bad boy with a twinkle in his eye as he dances
solo, with hat and coat rack, to Sinatra.
As Nick's experiences start to change him, Gibson just gets better. Several times
he's caught off guard as it suddenly hits him just how unlike the old Nick he's acting.
They're very winning moments that do a lot to sell the transformation the character is
going through.
Unfortunately, most of the women in the film don't come off quite as well. As
Darcy, Nick's nemesis-turned-romantic-interest, Helen Hunt gets the job done, but
she seldom comes to life the way Gibson does. Subplots abound featuring Lola the
coffee shop girl, Nick's daughter and seemingly half the women in his office.
Some of these work better than others, but they all compete for viewer
attention--not to mention Nick's--until they suddenly collide in an ending
that feels rushed.
This is probably the film's biggest flaw. It could have benefited greatly from
a little more trimming. Do yourself a favor and go for popcorn during the unnecessary,
irritating cameo by Bette Midler.
But What Women Want offers plenty of strengths to make up for its
shortcomings. In doing publicity for the film, Gibson has compared it to
romantic comedies made in the '30s and '40s, and that's an apt comparison.
This is a sweet, breezy love story, set in a fantasized Chicago where
Cole Porter tunes
drift on the air, and
everybody has a heart of gold in there somewhere.
