Stephanie Zacharek's scathing but amusing comments about
What Women Want, from salon.com: formerly at:
https://www.salon.com/2000/12/15/what_women_want/
but if you can't get that pretty version, here's the text --

Mel Gibson in pantyhose for starters -- but some would just rather
have fewer insulting movies like this one.

By Stephanie Zacharek, Dec. 15, 2000

Sometimes the most fascinating thing about being a spectator at
the parade of movies that passes by from year to year is trying to
figure out why certain movies are made when they are. Sometimes,
as in the case of the aggressively offensive Nancy Meyers comedy
"What Women Want," it's the only fascinating thing. For anyone
who's forced to endure it -- and I pity any human creature, male
or female, who's dragged to it by his or her date -- my words of
advice are this: Treat it as a sociological experiment. Why is a
movie like "What Women Want" slipping into the stream right now,
whether or not it really is what women, or anyone else for that
matter, want? The answer is simple, and it's explained in the
movie's first half-hour: Women have more buying power and more
disposable income than ever before. They're a juggernaut, and
somebody's test-marketing somewhere has determined that they want
to see Mel Gibson dancing about like a frustrated elf as he tries
to tug a pair of pantyhose over his adorable little keister. ("See
how he likes it!") They want to see a willfully clueless-about-women
man taken down a peg or two. They want to see him admit, "Women are 
smarter than men." Because maybe if he says it, then it must be true.
Right? And does my butt look big in these pants?

There's no way around the fact that although "What Women Want" is
being marketed toward women, it does nothing but condescend to
them. For that reason alone, it's an intriguing if ugly little
nugget of social history. Gibson is Nick Marshall, a
superhandsome, womanizing, divorced advertising guy who swings
into his Chicago office every day with a mix of charismatic sexual
savoir-faire and an inflated sense of entitlement. The women who
work with (and mostly under) him both tolerate him and swoon over
him, confused creatures that they are; they grumble over having to
do his filing, but they fairly crumple with delight when he pays
them a compliment or bumps into them accidentally. Nick's nose is
put out of joint when hotshot go-getter gal Darcy Maguire (Helen
Hunt) is hired away from a rival company and moves into his firm
as creative director. Gibson's boss, Dan (Alan Alda, in the kind
of razor-toothed nice-guy role he does better than anyone), has
made it clear that, seeing as women are holding the purse strings
in today's economy, his firm needs a woman's touch. (He doesn't
use those exact words, but he might as well have.) That makes Nick
resent Darcy even more; when she distributes pink boxes filled
with girly products (home leg-waxing kits, moisturizing lipstick,
padded bras) and asks the creative team to think of new ways to
sell them to women, he begins to despise her. He likes naked girls
in his ads, goddamn it. Does this mean he'll actually have to
change his modus operandi?

Suddenly, an accident knocks Nick unconscious. When he awakes, he
realizes he can hear the thoughts of the women around him. It's
mostly an unbearable cacophony of prattle about calorie counting
and makeup colors, but he quickly realizes that he can use his
newfound power for evil. So he sets out to sabotage his new
colleague by stealing her ideas and presenting them as his own.
Predictably, he falls in love with her in the process. During this
time, he also connects with his teenage daughter (Ashley Johnson),
who is virtually a stranger to him, and becomes distressed and
moved by hearing the thoughts of a suicidal young woman. Before
long he is that most docile and desirable species of wildlife: a
changed man. That's giving away the ending of "What Women Want,"
but only in the barest sense, because anyone who has ever seen an
ad knows how "What Women Want" will end. It's a movie draped like
a pampered courtesan around that most basic of women's fantasies:
the idea that a man will change for her, as the direct result of
nothing more than coming into contact with her very essence.

Of course, men learn from women all the time (and vice versa), and
sometimes they do change. But Meyers, aided and abetted by
screenwriters Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa, isn't deft or smart
enough to just give us a fanciful joy ride. Her story has to be
soaked in the same woozy psychology that Oprah Winfrey indulges
in. As an explanation for why Nick thinks he's the center of the
universe, we're told that his mother was a Vegas showgirl and that
he was raised by a gaggle of cooing, fussing, adoring, half-naked
women who catered to his every whim. Of course it should follow
that Nick grows up to be a guy who never listens to women and
thinks of them as his servants. Yet that's not so much useful
background information as some screenwriter's conception of what
women would like to believe about a character like Nick. It's more
convenient to buy the idea that a man raised by showgirls would
learn to view women as objects, when in reality he'd probably be
the kind of guy who enjoys listening to women, pleasing them and
just being around them. And he probably wouldn't leave the seat
up, either. The jokes in "What Women Want" are facile and cheap,
riffing on the blandest and most tiresome stereotypes about men
and women. There's one particularly pathetic joke in which Nick
pretends he's gay to hose down a female admirer's feelings for
him.

The movie is unbecomingly catty as well. Valerie Perrine and Delta
Burke are the two "yes" women who work for Nick, rushing to help
him take off his coat and fetch his coffee when he gets to the
office. When he first realizes he's received his special "gift,"
he's surrounded by feminine chatter all morning, until he reaches
the inner sanctum of his office, where all he hears is what his
two assistants actually say -- the not-so-subtle subtext is that
they have no thoughts. The female characters here don't provide
many challenges for the actresses who play them. Marisa Tomei, an
appealing and astute actress, has a thankless role here as a
coffee shop worker who's smitten with Nick. And Hunt's performance
is the kind of thing that will very quickly make her tiresome as
an actress. Her Darcy is a sharp cookie who nevertheless hides
layers of insecurity underneath, just the sort of character that
women are supposed to immediately identify with. But Meyers has no
use for Hunt's whiplash comic timing here. Instead, Hunt gets
plenty of opportunities to be stern and no-nonsense. She's really
good at making her mouth look like a straight little blank line.
Her characterization of Darcy seems like nothing more than a
conceit, a ruse to fool us into thinking that maybe she's not so
vulnerable, so that later we can pretend we're surprised to see
that she has weaknesses. "What Women Want" is full of those false
surprises, a suggestion (if not a confirmation) of Hollywood's
belief that genuine surprises are the last thing moviegoers want.

It's a shame, because after his ponderous and bloated performance
in the equally loathsome "The Patriot," the world could use a
surprise from Gibson. I've long adored Gibson as an actor, partly
because he's smart and intuitive, and partly because he's gorgeous
to look at. His best performances may not be his flashiest,
loudest ones. In 1997's "Conspiracy Theory," as a mentally
unbalanced cabdriver who concocts and disseminates elaborate
theories about government conspiracies, his performance was a
small marvel, a clutch of nervous tics and twitches that he plays
beautifully for laughs -- and then you realize he's turning a
vulnerable and guarded character inside-out before your very eyes.
But Gibson doesn't work any magic in "What Women Want," short of
turning on his crinkly smile now and then. His comic gifts are
woefully underused here. If it's amusing at all to see him
prancing around his bathroom in those pantyhose, it's funny only
in a fleeting, predictable way.

Gibson moves beautifully, with a comic grace that's infinitely
sexy, and you get a taste of that in an early scene where,
bounding out of his apartment building, he tells the doorwoman
he's feeling "fit as a dancing bear." The line is funny because it
perfectly suits the way he's just come tripping lightly through
his building's doors, like a stocky athlete with Gene Kelly in his
heart. Later, when he breaks into an impromptu soft-shoe to Frank
Sinatra's version of "I Won't Dance," the movie seems to skid to a
stop for just a moment, taking a hard right turn into the dream
world that we wish movies could be. I wanted to watch him dance
forever. But the sequence lasts barely a minute, and the rest of
the time Gibson simply goes through the motions. He's an
exceptionally charming comic actor, and watching him here is
hardly torture. But the performance feels constrained, as if he
knows he's the picture's chief marketing draw -- in essence, its
dancing bear. That's part of the air of calculation and heavily
perfumed cynicism that hangs over "What Woman Want" like a
poisonous cloud.

If the final vision of "What Women Want" is at all grounded in
reality, it's almost too depressing to think about. Women want men
to listen to and understand them, and they also want men to tell
them what they want to hear. It's much more cheering to think of
"What Women Want" as an extended commercial for Hollywood's idea
of what it thinks women want. At one point in the movie Darcy,
referring to the buying power of women, admonishes her assembled
advertising minions, "We can't afford not to have a piece of the
$40 billion pie." Neither can the movie industry. Now it's just
waiting to see if we'll bite.

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About the writer: Stephanie Zacharek is a staff writer for Salon
Arts & Entertainment.