Dr T and the Women *
Dir: Robert Altman
With: Richard Gere, Helen Hunt, Farrah Fawcett, Laura Dern, Shelley Long, Tara Reid, Kate Hudson, Liv Tyler
121 mins, cert 12
www.drtandthewomen.com
If only the hero of this silly, supercilious, casually misogynist nonsense hadn't got a medical degree - then it would have been Mr T and the Women: the amorous and domestic trials of a cigar-chompin' mercenary with a dodgy mohican. It couldn't have been worse than this, and might have been more honest about its sexual politics.
The career of director Robert Altman surely can't sink any lower - can it? Will he get to work with an unfunnier and less interesting script than this? Or elicit more unhappy and self-conscious performances than these, dying a slow and horrible death up on the screen? What is remarkable is how Altman expects us to accept the leading character on his own self- congratulatory terms; this is Dr Sullivan Travis, the top gynaecologist in Dallas, played by Richard Gere, a decent family man who genuinely loves and respects women in all their diversity - hell, he's even given his shotgun a woman's name!
Which is why they all love him, all the yammering chuckle-headed female dependants in his life. There's his ditsy secretary Shelley Long, who keeps Dr T's neurotic patients in line, while naturally harbouring a monumental crush on the man himself. There are his two lovely daughters, Tara Reid and Kate Hudson, supposedly college graduates who are, respectively, a kooky JFK conspiracy tour guide and a reserve-list cheerleader for the Dallas Cowboys. Then there's his secret tippler sister-in-law, Laura Dern, and her three tiny daughters (who are no more tiresome or infantilised than the rest of Dr T's "women").
At the apex of these no-brain lovelies is Farrah Fawcett, who gives the most embarrassing performance of the year as Dr T's wife. She suffers a breakdown in a shopping mall, and does some floaty spiritual child-like dancing in the fountain, before taking her clothes off - and for a microsecond we cop a hazy full frontal of Ms Fawcett, or her shapely body double.
Turns out she's suffering from a "Hestia Complex", a condition similar to Dave Stewart's Paradise Syndrome, a regressive state caused by getting so gosh-darned much love from Richard Gere! So he sensitively bangs her up in the bin, and Farrah's heartbreaking running around with her kiddie paintings and baby-talk is classic Golden Raspberry material. And in any case, she wasn't giving Gere his conjugal rights, so Gere is more than justified in having an affair with the assistant golf pro at his club, played by Helen Hunt whose "interesting" looks are, as ever, supposed to signal that this is more mature than just a fling.
Repeatedly, Gere bangs on that you have to understand women, and to him they are individual snowflake-type things of wonder. Then why, you ask, do all of Dr T's women look the same? They are all - family and non-family - blonde, pert, snub-nosed and cute, as if turned out by the same plastic surgeon. A plastic surgeon who, if poor Farrah is anything to go by, ought to have his licence revoked. They are all Stepford Wives, Stepford Daughters, Stepford Sisters-in-Law and Stepford Patients. But they are clearly being sold to us as a great lovely quilt of multitudinous womanhood.
And the high-earning grey-haired exquisite at the centre of these gurgling Aryan centrefolds isn't supposed to be a smug prat - just adorably hopeless and vulnerable, not to mention thoroughly dishy and emotionally literate. A decent guy with a lot on his plate - and a lot of needy ladies with their legs up in his stirrups, awaiting his magic speculum.
None of which need matter, or matter quite so much, if the movie itself weren't so lame. Altman's signature touches - the big multi-storyline canvas, the roving multi-conversational scenario - go for nothing here. There is no sense of anything interesting or complex attempted, and the ambient wittering of the patients in Dr T's office is just incredibly irritating. We get it first over a protracted travelling take for the opening credits - and then over and over and over again: exactly the same scene with the same patients complaining about being kept waiting.
With its ersatz sophistication, this movie could have been made at any time over the last 25 years, probably with Goldie Hawn, and maybe Alan Alda in the lead role. Actually, Alda might still have been preferable to the Buddha-like Gere - as ever, a fantastically wooden dreamboat, who keeps forgetting to do his Dallas accent. When a strong emotional reaction is called for, his face assumes a stunned immobility, as if he has realised he's left the oven on. And yet again Gere does his Sudden Laughing thing: his mannerism of transcending whatever fraught situation he's in by laughing as if to show how joyously, liberatingly absurd he suddenly finds it. At his daughter's wedding, everything ends in chaos. So Gere gives us the left-the-oven-on face for a while; then it's the sudden laughing.
Robert Altman has given us a very long 121 minutes in the cinema, and a lot of dire performances from big names - young and youngish, old and oldish. Orchestrating a bunch of stars in a talky ensemble comedy is tricky; only Woody Allen does it well. But Allen has a knack for cowing the talent, plus, generally, a sparkling script. Certainly, Altman doesn't have the second of these. Dr T and the Women marks a terrible cul-de-sac for this director; he needs a new direction.
