Dr. T & the Women (2000) Reviews

• If you dig Robert Altman's style, it's worth it

  Lumpenprole2002-05-20

  spoilers I'm definitely fond of this movie. Richard Gere comes off a serious person and his acting is perfect, which I wasn't expecting at all. The film was very well made and ended on a note I thought was much more sincere than anything I've seen in movies recently. The dialogue and plot took me two sittings to absorb. Having said that, I gotta admit, people will hate this film. Like most Altman pieces, the plot is not driven by outside events so much as it's driven by how characters feel and act towards each other. Dr. T is a rather extreme example of this, where almost nothing happens but the spectacular collapse of a wedding, a failed relationship, and a short-story magic ending. The arc of the plot is the growth of the Richard Gere character from a needy person who has been unconsciously trying to make himself the center of a kingdom of dependent women into a person who finds new meaning in his work with people. Dr. T begins the movie as a man who is perfectly happy. He's an overwhelming professional success with an attractive family and nothing but more of expensive happiness to look forward to. But he's immersed in demanding women. He has spent his whole life trying to put women on pedestals so that he can bask in their praise and affection. This isn't exactly evil, but the movie shows how his life begins to unravel as a result of this basically sexist outlook he has devoted his life to. After what must have been decades of relentless smothering, his wife reverts to a childlike state. (An expensive psychiatrist assures him that it's from having a life that's `too perfect,' which is probably a way of telling him what's wrong without saying exactly why.) His heroic efforts as an OB/GYN have led his patients to make unreasonable demands on him that make his job a hell. He appears to have gotten the needs of his daughters backwards as far as which one requires more attention. His time-bomb sister-in-law has moved into his home with her gaggle of little girls. Just as all of this comes apart, he runs into a woman from outside Dr. T's kingdom. Helen Hunt plays a woman who doesn't need him and won't let herself rely on his courtesies and affections. He tells her frankly that he's never met any woman like her, which is a sad thing really. Then it all falls apart and in his lowest moment he's wrenched away from the mess he's made of his life by a tornado out of The Wizard of Oz (people can believe in Yoda, clips of ammo that never empty, accept a deluge of frogs from the sky, and that a man can be just a little jarred after shooting himself in the head to kill Tyler Durden, but a magic tornado is too much…) Dr. T finds himself without his expensive status symbols or his dependent entourage of hypochondriacs, in a place without even a phone. He does his job and he doesn't even get a girl. It's a boy and it's all new to him and that fills him with joy. There are other Altman traits will drive people up the wall - the plot that feels like sprawl the first time through, the lack of signposts to obviously sympathetic characters, insistence on sorting moral ambiguities, doing satire in a PC world where even the shopping classes can't be made fun of, the layers of dialogue and so on. What I try to tell people that are new to Altman is that he pretty much invented the TV drama forms we respect. E.R. and Hill Street Blues and any number of TV dramas thrive off Altman's formula - which is to pick an interesting locale, drop a ton of characters in, and set them in motion. Events happen, but the real drama is watching the characters interact every week. The Hollywood film industry has moved in the opposite direction, which is soap opera. There you take a big cast of canned personalities, drop them in an upper income setting and write some love story or coming-of-age bit around the quest/monsters/gun fights that actually make them move from scene to scene. Neither is inherently better, but the multiplex has gravitated towards the second so completely that most people are utterly confused when seeing the first. Unless you're interested in seeing a movie about a man who is forced to change the values he built his life on with the best intentions, you'll hate it. If you dig seeing that dramatized, Dr. T is fairly unique. Also, I wish Altman had some pull with whoever is doing the advertising for his films. Marketing Dr. T as a screwball comedy and Gosford Park as a whodunit has probably done more damage to his reputation than anything else. Illiterate marketing is almost as big a problem as trailers that give the best parts of movies away - I wish the studios would be a little more thoughtful about it.

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• No really, I like this movie

  shanepang2005-09-24

  I'm sorry, but I like this movie. It might just be my defense of Robert Altman, but I think that this is a good comedy. Dr. T who devotes his life to taking care of women, but never considers how they could take care of themselves. He loves everything about women, and women love him. However, nothing he can do can protect them in the end. The problem is that this film was presented as a movie for women: a date movie that you can drag a boyfriend or husband to in order to prove love and devotion. The film is actually examining women, their needs and relationships with or without a strong male figure. This isn't a chick flick; it's an analytic comedy. So, the intended movie date turns out to be a disappointment for both parties who have no idea what to expect. The only positive aspect of this whole misunderstanding is that now, years later, Dr. T ends up on the cheap rack at any DVD store. So don't rent it, buy it, give it another look and even if you don't like it, sell it for even cheaper. When this movie is available for less than a dollar, no one will have any excuse not to watch it. Several of the people will end up actually liking it.

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• Satisfying, But Not Great Altman

  gbheron2003-12-20

  Robert Altman appreciates women. It shows in his movies; women are often the main characters, and his films offer up a variety of interesting roles for actresses. Dr. T and the Women is almost entirely about women, modern day wealthy Texas women. Richard Gere plays Dr. Sully Travis a very successful and popular Dallas gynecologist. Not only is he surrounded by women all day at work, but his family consists entirely of women. Only a couple of male buddies enter into his closed, female dominated life. And like all good Altman movies there are plenty of quirky characters and intersecting plotlines. The problem is that the plotlines aren't that interesting or original. Dr. T's wife develops a rare mental disorder that affects only the wealthy, and must be institutionalized. The new female golf pro comes on to Dr. T, as does his nurse. His soon-to-be-married daughter is slowly realizing that she may be a lesbian. And so on. For Altman fans, Dr. T and the Women is not a bad rental. The director has done better, but it's still Altman. Others, less interested, might want to give this a pass.

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• Ah, Feminism, the feminist's new enemy

  tieman642010-07-13

  "We haven't come close to the medium's full potential yet. Everything is still so linear." – Robert Altman Altman's technique is so alien, that most viewers automatically dismiss his films as being shoddily put together, which is a shame, because he really is one of the most consistently interesting directors out there. Typically, Altman begins by constructing an environment (military hospital, theatre, rodeo, diner etc), introducing a large cast, inserting some self referential "performance within a performance" (play, wedding, radio show, etc) and then adopting a style in which the whole cinematic world flows independently of what we see. In other words, his plots seem to unfold even when we don't watch, his camera floating from one nodule to the next, stumbling upon bits and pieces of a "story". But the story is itself non-defined, and it's up to us to synthesise the pieces and make it all coherent. The environment in this case is Dallas, Texas, a world which Altman viciously reduces to a set of stereotypes (Altman is always at his most mean-spirited in his supposedly lighter, more comedic movies). This is a cartoon world of gas guzzling, upper class Texans, giant SUVs, vapid students, expensive clothing, Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, JFK conspiracy theorists and so forth. Even the film's lead character is cast solely as to allow Altman to exploit Richard Gere's iconography (Gere has made a career out of playing suave womanizers). The film begins with a horde of women bickering in a gynaecologist's reception room. Their voices overlap and overlap until we're left with nothing but annoying static. It's up to Dr. T, a smooth, suave and sexy gynaecologist (played by Richard Gere, of course), to untangle all this noise and please his woman, satisfying their needs and fulfilling their various emotional problems. The very next scene works as a counterpoint. Dr T's mentally unstable wife walks through a shopping mall, takes off all her clothes and dances in a fountain. No surprise that she's under a shop sign which links her to a deity. She's not only a goddess, an innocent nymph who exists only to be naked, worshipped, twirl and look pretty, but another up-market commodity. As one psychologist says in the film, she's been "loved and pampered too much", Dr T putting his wife on such a high a pedestal that she eventually regresses to a childlike state, unable to do anything for herself. What follows are a number of symbolic little scenes. The men in the film are dumb carnalists who hunt and shoot flying golf balls, whilst the women are all ditsy airheads, drunks, lesbians or vacuous shopaholics. The women of Dallas are also fighting for a Dallas freeway to be named after a woman, an act which Dr T himself supports; anything to keep the ladies happy. Existing outside all these characters is a woman played by Helen Hunt. She's a retired golf pro, far more calm and collected than all the idiotic characters swirling around her. As a professional golfer, she's literally "in command" of all the balls in the film. She and Gere forge a romance, but she abruptly calls it off when he offers to provide and take care of all her needs. "Why would I want that?" she says with a shrug. Helen Hunt - the only female huntsman in the film - knows that men hide their dependency needs and narcissistic vulnerability behind a fairly primitive phallic chauvinism. She's also aware that men symbolically control their women through phallic mastery, supremacy and dependence. The film then becomes a sort of feminist tract, Hunt's character raising the issue of female empowerment and opining that women should "follow their hearts", "reject society's expectations", "be independent", "be strong" and "be as sexually promiscuous as men". Another character in the film, played by Kate Hudson, exhibits this same character arc: she turns her back on marriage and various authority figures (breaks the rules, answers phone in class etc) and embraces a lesbian love affair. But while the film advocates a form of women's liberation and suggests that women strongly dependent on men accomplish nothing (naming a freeway after a woman isn't a point for feminism, it's just a way to further placate loudmouths), such things are hardly new. It's been over half a century since the largest feminist movements, and if Altman genuinely wished to say something about womanhood, he'd have done so decades ago. No, what the film's really doing is presenting Dallas as the last bastion against the feminist revolution, and Gere, who thinks he's some smooth lover of women, as an unwitting ally of the anti-feminists. Worship at the alter of the uterus, in other words, and you reduce woman to the various stereotypes in the film. You remove their complexity, their desires. The alcoholism and vacuity of the women in the film is the direct result of men fawning over them. But the film goes further than this; so much so that you might even call it anti-feminist. Remove the chivalrous romantics like Gere, Altman says, and you're left with a world of Helen Hunts, family units destroyed, everyone sexually liberated, self-centric and cold. After realising this, Gere drives off into the rain, is sucked into a magical tornado (yes this really happens) and delivers a young Mexican woman's baby. In graphic detail, we see a child emerging from a bloody womb, a scene which immediately and violently clashes with everything we've seen before. Romance is gone, in other words, and replaced with cold biology. And yet Gere finds some nobility in his newfound role. Holding a blood smeared baby in his hands he allows himself a smile. He still worships at the altar, but that altar is no longer pretty. 8/10 – Excellent. Incidentally, Doctor T's name, Sullivan Travis, alludes to Preston Sturges "Sullivan's Travels", both films about a character learning their true value and contribution to society.

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• Inexplicably and Incoherently Awful

  mzee752001-06-26

  ***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** My wife and I picked this movie off the rental store shelf purely off it's star-power. We figured, "How can eight marquee-level stars all be wrong?" After watching the film, we had to ask, "How did eight marquee-level stars get duped into appearing in this dreck?" First of all, I'm absolutely shocked to find it was penned by a woman. Why? Think of a negative female stereotype, and this film screams it into an amplified bullhorn. Without exception, ALL the female characters are completely neurotic, ludicrously overdressed, blindly self-absorbed, and chatter incessantly about nothing of substance whatsoever, often several characters at a time crescendoing into a mind-grating cacophony. Even Helen Hunt, who at first appears to be a calm in the midst of this maelstrom, (Look out! This may "ruin" it for ya!) turns out to be a man-eating snake. Enter Dr. T: The Rock of Gibraltar, the only character with more substance than a french fry. Nothing phases him; not his wife getting naked in a crowded shopping center and thus being committed to an insane asylum (because, as her psychoanalyst puts it, Dr. T. just loved her too much), not his daughter who runs into the arms of her lesbian lover rather than her fiancee - at the altar no less, not the hordes of sex-starved and under-appreciated women who clamor into his office almost daily, and no, not even a Texas tornado. That's right. Dr. T. survives a tornado that would've made Dorothy and Toto proud -- without a scratch! He gets up, dusts himself off, and follows some Spanish speaking children to a remote Mexican village just in time to deliver a baby (and yeah, they show EVERYTHING). What a man! The suspension of disbelief required for this film to have any redeeming qualities is going to break the bell curve. Please, instead of cursing your poor video-box-reading judgement like I have been, do something comparatively constructive. Like watching infomercials.

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