Main cast: Mel Gibson (Nick Marshall), Helen Hunt (Darcy Maguire), Marisa Tomei (Lola), Alan Alda (Dan Wanamaker), Lauren Holly (Gigi), Robert Briscoe Evans (Ted), Ashley Johnson (Alexandra Marshall), Mark Feuerstein (Morgan Farwell), Delta Burke (Eve), Valerie Perrine (Margo), Judy Greer (Erin), Sarah Paulson (Annie), Ana Gasteyer (Sue Cranston), Diana-Maria Riva (Stella), Lisa Edelstein (Dina), Loretta Devine (Flo), and Eric Balfour (Cameron)
Director: Nancy Meyers
Is there anything more repulsive than a blatantly calculated movie aimed at women? What Women Want succeeds where Oprah Winfrey and the entire women’s magazine staff of New York couldn’t despite their best efforts – demonizing the entire female species as shallow, clueless, insecure, and neurotic one-dimensional creatures who live only to nab a man and change him to her measurements. Can a movie get any viler than that?
Well, it has Helen Hunt, that bland poster-girl for Oxygen. Oops.
Mel Gibson plays a disgruntled executive whose chance at promotion is nabbed by Darcy. After an electrocution gives him an ability to read women’s minds, he decides to get even with Darcy.
Naturally he falls in love with her. The end.
But really, this movie is vile. Darcy might as well be a Cosmo blow-up doll for all the personality she displays, which fits right to a T the definition of a modern woman according to these women’s mag. A modern woman whose sole ambition is to have a career until the biological clock ticks, and then panic because there isn’t a man in her life. Darcy is not only not a match for Nick, she actually collapses in the face of adversity. Oh, she got a man in the end – and since she has also attained her career aims, toss self-respect – honey, she got a man! Woo-hoo!
If Nick is an odious character, that’s because the script makes him that way. Every woman panders to him shamelessly in this movie. But hey, I do feel sorry for him too, because the movie humiliates him mercilessly in its notion that a woman wants to get a man just to change him. Nick is made to wear women’s stockings and learns to be sensitive. Where the movie could’ve stopped at making him learn to be a better person, it proceeds further, making him in effect a woman at the end of the movie.
In doing so, What Women Want mocks both men and women, dumbing down the relationship dynamics between a man and woman into a new low.
