Mel Gibson has a certain comic talent, which emerged in his Lethal Weapon series of movies – a kind of practical-joker air, a naughty-boy glint in the eyes. It rendered his mad-policeman character appealing and memorable, and made a pleasant change after the grimly taciturn road warrior he played in the Mad Max films. After all, we really only need one Clint Eastwood.
Gibson tried to inject some of this humour into his (a)historical epics, Braveheart and The Patriot, though the sight of a chair collapsing under him was the most amusing moment in the latter film. His humour certainly works best as a sidebar to the psychotic-cop persona: all on its own, it has little to recommend it.
In the hit romantic comedy What Women Want, Gibson plays Nick, a sexist Casanova of an ad exec. He is described as a “man’s man”, though a more appropriate description may be a “juvenile’s man”. In fact, he’s a consummate jerk. The film opens with his ex-wife, his daughter and some colleagues enumerating his faults. He’s an egomaniac, a bad father, a bad husband and so on.
His firm’s new creative director is a woman, Darcy McGuire (Helen Hunt), and that is threatening to Nick, who immediately tries to find a way to undermine her – while also trying to get with the programme of her drive to create ads that appeal to women. This involves he-man Nick trying lipstick and leg-wax, which generates a certain amount of laughter (it’s the funniest sequence in the film) and culminates in a bathroom accident that magically endows him with the ability to hear women’s thoughts as they think them. At first Nick is confused and worried about this, then – helped by Bette Midler, whose few minutes in the film briefly lift it
up a notch – accepts his new superpower and decides to take advantage of it.
This is a fun idea. It’s a pity someone didn’t think of it 50 years ago, when Billy Wilder could have made it with, say, Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. With a leading man of some genuine charisma and charm, and a woman to make an antagonist worthy of the name, it could have been tremendous. As it is, Hunt’s rather pinched Darcy is no match at all for a smirking, preening, mugging, leering, swaggering Gibson, who so packs his every glance with the aforementioned naughty-boy glint that he’s quite unstoppable.
He bulldozes his way toward redemption, since that’s the well-worn paradigm of the film – morally suspect character undergoes change of heart. Except that Nick doesn’t seem to change much over the course of the film; he just opens his eyes ever wider.
Certainly, Gibson is incapable of conveying character development, and Nick’s growing empathy for women, if that’s what it is, just seems increasingly creepy, like a more sophisticated form of CIA surveillance. With the assistance of mid-coital mind-reading, he gives a vulnerable woman the fuck of her life, then, to get away from her, tells her he’s gay. This is idiotic.
Not that it matters: one cannot in any case take seriously the attempt to make us disapprove of pre-transformation Nick. We’re really only asked to produce an indulgent “Tut tut” at his boorish antics, so there is no real investment in his becoming a better person. Likewise, it is hard to invest emotionally in his getting together with Darcy, because there isn’t any electricity between them anyway. In terms of sex-appeal, the combination of Gibson’s dyed rug and Hunt’s fake-looking tan and pale blue eyeshadow is not exactly a turn-on. The answer the film gives to Freud’s famous question – “What do women want?” – appears to be: Mel Gibson.Still naughty, but a tiny tad more sensitive, if you can buy that. As irritating as it is offensive, What Women Want is the kind of film that gives heterosexuals a bad name.