Product: What Women Want [VHS] (2000)
Rating: 5.0
An Elegantly Comic and Twilight-Zonish Masterpiece
Mel Gibson's superb comic timing, rougish charm, and drippingly gorgeous looks are largely reponsible for making this film a winner. He plays Nick Marshall, a Chicago ad executive whose male chauvinism, we are led to believe, is the inevitable result of his upbringing by a Las Vegas showgirl mother and her rather unsavory cohorts. The relationships with the women in his life are distant and unhealthy, until one night,after a splendid dance number, an accident with a hairdryer, which takes place in time to a well-orchestrated waltz, changes his life. After the electric shock renders him able to hear women's thoughts, he finds himself at a loss, realizing how much he is resented by the opposite sex, but takes advantage of his new boss, Darcy McGuire, played by Helen Hunt whose natural beauty, wit, and intelligence make her the perfect foil for Gibson, and of a lonely coffee shop clerk played with pathos by Marisa Tomei. The scene in which he spends an ilicit evening with Tomei's character, Lola, is a hilarious one in which Gibson once more displays the powerfully muscular physique that could have inspired Michaelangelo's "David". In contrast, the scenes where he hams it up on an outing with his long-neglected daughter, Alex, played by a doll-faced but fashionable-looking Ashley Johnson, are a bit more poignant when at one point, his fatherly pride stands revealed on his face. Of all the females whose minds he is able to read, it is the stinging evaluation of his teenage daughter, whose boyfriend treats women the same way he does, that wounds Nick Marshall the most. Alan Alda's role as Nick's equally chauvinistic mentor is an ironic one, given Alda's well-known real-life support of women's issues. Mark Feurstein is funny as Nick's protege who becomes baffled by his mentor's chane of heart. We can't write Nick off completely because his new found ability gradually makes him a better person, even compelling him to personally reconcile with a spurned employee with a suicidal bent, and sparing the feelings of a former fling, even though he resorts to lying. Darcy Maguire is strong enough to appropriately penalize Nick for using her. But in Movieland, there are few women whom the spreading of Gibson's lazily-formed, sharp-cornered Cupid's Bow mouth into a dazzling smile can't disarm. Lauren Holly, and Bette Midler as Nick's ex-wife and ex-marriage counselor, and Valerie Perrine and Delta Burke as Nick's mindless office mannequins provide intersting counterparts. While it probably could have been a little less crass, and certain scenes are definitely not for children, "What Women Want", arguably 2000's answer to "The First Wives Club", is a stylish charmer that I'd recommend to anyone, male or female.