Dr. T & The Women movie review (2000)
One day Kate goes shopping with her chic friends, and something cracks. She wanders through the mall, shedding clothes (in front of the Godiva store), ending up nude in a fountain. She is institutionalized. A psychiatrist explains she suffers from the "Hestia complex," a syndrome affecting "affluent, upper-class women who have pretty much all they need." She is too fortunate and too loved, and has cracked up because she cannot understand why she deserves her good fortune.
This diagnosis has enraged certain feminist critics of the film, who see it reflecting hostility toward women. But why? We have had countless films about men abusing women (Fawcett starred in two of them), but let there be one film in which women suffer from affluence, idleness and too much love, and it is an attack on the sex. I find the movie's purpose ironic and satirical, not hateful, and certainly Dr. T continues to love his wife and to visit her, although his visits seem to make her worse, not better.
It is only after Kate seems likely to be institutionalized indefinitely that Dr. T begins to see another woman, at first without really meaning to cheat. She is Bree (Helen Hunt), the new golf pro at his country club, and has a tactful frankness about what she wants. She invites him over for dinner, and there is a tables-turned quality about the way Dr. T is the "date," given a drink and left to stand around and smile, while Bree shows off by slapping the steaks on the grill.
Because this is an Altman film, there are a lot of other major roles; he is too expansive to be limited by the tunnel vision of most screenplays, and with his writer, Anne Rapp, he juggles several story lines. Sometimes characters in the backgrounds of shots are involved in entirely other plots than those in the foreground. One of these is Carolyn (Shelley Long), the nurse who runs Dr. T's office and imagines herself as his wife. There is also screen time for Dr. T's two daughters, so different in the ways they turned out--there is something revealing about her materialist culture that Dee Dee is clearly prepared, even at her tender age, to make a marriage of convenience.
What holds the stories and the characters together is the decency of Dr. T, and Gere seems wholly comfortable with the role. He plays a good man of modest requirements and dutiful conscience, plugging away, trying to get his job done, trying not to be driven mad by Freud's unanswerable question, "What do women want?" Because this is a comedy, he even finds the answer, sort of.
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