The Problematics: ‘What Women Want,’ In Which The Power To Read Female Minds Is Bestowed Upon (Oh Boy) Mel Gibson

Happy February, “Problematics” person.  February is the month of Valentine’s Day, and hence the month of the rom-com. You’re certainly all familiar with the scores of rom-coms that inspired the legendary Onion headline “Romantic-Comedy Behavior Gets Real-Life Man Arrested” so we’re going to steer clear of that low-hanging fruit. This week we consider even lower-hanging fruit: a romantic comedy starring Mel Gibson. 

That joke’s no fair. In 2000, when Nancy Meyers directed Gibson in the film under consideration, What Women Want, Mel wasn’t exactly known as the Friend To Womankind (that’s a joke too — what I actually mean is a radical opposite to that) he is today. Even so, the character he plays in What Women Want, a divorced adman and aggressive serial monogamist who acquires the power to hear the thoughts of all females (even canines!), squares with a cavalier reactionary profile that Gibson’s own interviews at the time hinted at, to put it mildly. One of his female assessors, in the film’s opening, refers to Gibson’s Nick Marshall as the “least politically correct guy in the universe.” LOL! As far as it went with Gibson, we didn’t know the half of it. 

In between shots of Nick swaggering around his apartment, the coffee stand where he flirts with an attractive barista played by Marisa Tomei, and his office, we’re treated to glimpses of his childhood. His mom was apparently a Vegas showgirl who raised him backstage. So essentially he was Joe Gideon in All That Jazz. Okay. The Freudian insights don’t add to any payoff and are just extraneous details in this overstuffed piñata of a two-hour-plus movie. 

Nick is a smarmy guy who in today’s environment would be an HR nightmare. He tells a female colleague this joke: “You know the difference between a wife and a job? After ten years a job still sucks!” (I always thought if you were going to tell a firing-for-cause joke to a colleague, it should at least be a good joke, but that’s just me.) After being passed up for a promotion, he learns he’s soon going to answer to Darcy McGuire (Helen Hunt), a female (duh) advertising powerhouse who’s going to make his firm more competitive in the increasingly-female-targeting world of advertising. 

I remember many years ago reading an interview with Malcolm Gladwell in which he complained that people mistakenly believed him to be against advertising, and him saying, “I like advertising. I think it’s cool.” I like advertising, or liked advertising, in the sense that when I worked at a glossy magazine it was advertising revenues in part that allowed me to stay in a $12,000-a-week hotel in Cannes, but that’s about as far as it goes. As for What Women Want, it looooves advertising and it thinks it’s one of the grooviest fields you can be in, so that’s one major problematic for any of you communists out there. 

For those of us with a higher bar, superficially speaking What Women Want never outrightly crosses the line from awkward to outright hateful. But it messes around on that line a lot. Seen from today’s perspective, its main issue is Gibson, who is no longer in any way credible as a character who has a Learning Experience That Makes Him More Empathetic. But let’s forget even that for a minute. Even looking at the movie with the closest I could get to Year 2000 eyes, he hasn’t got what it needs, which is comedic fleet-footedness.

Could Gibson EVER do light comedy? On the evidence of 1994’s Maverick, a perfectly amiable Western romp directed by Gibson’s Lethal Weapon padrone Richard Donner and costarring legend James Garner and stalwart Gibson friend Jodie Foster, yes, absolutely. (It’s kind of odd that this enjoyable movie has gone so far down the pop culture memory hole.) And he was often very funny in his dramatic work. So what’s the problem here? From where I sat, he seemed, since Maverick, to have acquired a lugubriousness. 

One of the most elaborate scenes in the movie is the one leading up to the electrical shock that gives him his mind-reading powers. Attempting to “get into the psyche” of a woman, Nick toddles around his apartment. He steals a CD from his daughter’s overnight bag and plays Meredith Brooks’ “Bitch” on the stereo. He puts a Biore pore strip on his nose. He paints his nails. In a bit presaging The 40-Year-Old Virgin, he gives his shin a waxing. (“Women are insane, who would do that more than once?”) Gibson is very game as he prances through this bit. He’s just not very light. His physical acting has a slur, a slowness. It’s off-balance, tipsy, trying too hard.

Nick acquires his powers to hear the thoughts of all women (and boy, are they noisy at first) about 30 minutes into the movie. In a picture from the ‘40s the high concept would kick in at minute fifteen at the latest, if I recall correctly. (I’m certainly over-generalizing but you get the idea.) Did I call this movie an overstuffed piñata? It also resembles a 10-pound calzone. It’s got a little more than the usual executive-note bloat that distinguished studio movies from the mid-’80s on. 

One of the first thoughts he hears when he’s got the power is that of his African-American door woman, who admires Nick’s “fine ass, looking like Shaft.” To which one can only respond — then and now — “aw, hell no.” There’s a rather mean-spirited joke in which Nick’s two loyal female assistants, played by Valerie Perrine and Delta Burke (who sports a convincing Brooklyn accent for some reason), are revealed as literally empty headed. Later in the movie, a spurned bed partner, mistaking Nick’s clairvoyance for hypersensitivity, gives herself an out for being ghosted by concluding that Nick is gay. Meyers and the movie park themselves into homophobia-adjacent space that, sad to say, was pretty standard issue at the time. The most offensive thread, however, belongs to the suicidal employee at Nick’s job who’s doled out the film-language equivalent of negging before her story resolves on the dubious conclusion that depression can be cured with a job promotion. 

For the most part, the movie sticks to just what you’re expecting. Nick first experiences his power as a torture. Gibson does some of his funniest acting looking terrified — Stooges man that he is, he makes like Larry Fine cowering before Moe Howard every time a woman approaches. Then he experiences them as a pleasure. Stands to reason: Bette Midler, in a funny bit role as a shrink, tells him “If men are from Mars, and women are from Venus, then you speak Venusian.”  This can afford him advantages both professionally and personally. But we all know that eventually it’s got to make him a better man. Who will find love with the Helen Hunt character, even as he’s trading his sports-business power wardrobe for softer pastels and grays.

And so he does, because in the end this movie is not so much about women getting what they want as women forgiving men like Nick Marshall. And here I have to hand it to Gibson — he puts in the work for his “give me one more chance” monologue with Hunt. Certainly a lot more work than Gibson the man himself did on his varied non-apology tours after exhibiting aberrant behavior in 2006 and 2010. Nowadays to merely cast Mel Gibson in a movie, as I have had occasion to observe more than once, is to engage in a form of shit-stirring. (I have also used the term “scab-picking.” And I like him. As an actor, I mean.) The chances of Nancy Meyers hiring him again are pretty slim. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.