It wouldn’t be unfair to say that the long and storied career of Robert Altman was more of a “fade away” action, rather than a “burning out.” Here at the beginning of the end of the new millennium, Altman has just four films left. Two of them — Gosford Park, which we’ll talk about next week, and his final film A Prairie Home Companion — are each the kind of movie most directors would be proud to make. He’s a year away from Gosford Park, though, and six away from A Prairie Home Companion. We’re also seven years past Short Cuts, the last exceptional film in his catalog. It’s easy to imagine Altman junkies, fresh off the adequate high of the suicide comedy Cookie’s Fortune, seeing the similarly stacked cast of 2000’s Dr. T & the Women and getting excited. Richard Gere! Farrah Fawcett! Liv Tyler! Shelley Long! Helen Hunt, in her first role after As Good as it Gets and Twister! Laura Dern, fresh off October Sky! Kate Hudson, a month after Almost Famous came out! Andy Richter? Why not?!
A jumble of crossed-wired, lazy performances and a needlessly dizzying cast of characters, Dr. T & the Women is exactly that kind of “too many cooks in the kitchen” disaster that only a talented director can orchestrate. Everywhere you look in Dr. T, from the overbaked Lyle Lovett soundtrack (which feels like a socially awkward friend, clumsily elbowing into scenes and misreading tone), to the terrible script, to the often jarring editing (a shock, considering the normally masterful hand of longtime Altman editor Geraldine Peroni), you find fumblings and missed opportunities. For as jam-packed with fried gold as the cast list is, few gave performances anywhere north of mediocre. Even Gere, the subtle and magnetic heartthrob who stole every straight woman’s heart in Pretty Woman, feels like he’s phoning it in.
Gere, ever the silver fox, plays highly successful Dallas gynecologist Sully Travis, known by all of his patients simply as — you guessed it! — Dr. T. And goddamn, do his patients ever love him; as the opening credits roll, we watch nurses and receptionists buzzing around a waiting room jam-packed with women, all there for the good doctor, who cannot stick to a schedule to save his life. Altman is no stranger to scenes where people talk over and past each other, but this glimpse into Dr. T’s office only serves to show us what these scenes will feel like throughout the film. Why doesn’t Dr. T’s scheduler simply not book 20 different appointments in the same afternoon? This is unclear, but after five full minutes of cacophonous chattering with nothing gained, one thing is: we should be viewing the din of this gynecologist’s office as a canary in a coal mine.
We’re treated to a slow rollout of the rest of Dr. T’s family: his wife Kate (Fawcett), and his daughters, the bride-to-be Dee Dee (Hudson) and JFK conspiracy theory tour guide Connie (Tara Reid, who knocks this role outta the park). Except for his dopey pack of golf/hunting buddies (one of which, played by Richter, is the husband of one of his more obsessive patients), Dr. T is surrounded by women, from his drunk sister-in-law Peggy (Dern) to his secretary Carolyn (Long). One day, things begin to unravel when Kate, on an outing to Tiffany’s to help Dee Dee with her wedding registry, decides to strip off all of her clothes and dance around in the Northpark Shopping Center’s fountain, surrounded by women laughing and commenting on how fake her breasts are. What’s the cause of this hysteria? If Kate’s doctors are to be believed, it’s because Dr. T is just too good of a husband. We’re serious.
Dr. T & the Women wants us to believe that this is all because the good doctor simply “gets” women, but other than simply being kind (and, okay, speaking on behalf of the Fairness & Beauty for Dallas club to get some freeways named after WOMEN for a change!), we don’t get an opportunity to ever grasp what makes women give each other brain injuries just to see him. Does using an old fur coat to line the stirrups and using a smaller speculum on someone in a sexual dry spell mean he “understands” women? This never comes across, which means Dr. T becomes yet another example of a man being elevated for the bare minimum — and if that’s the joke, then they played it far too straight. We end on his greatest act, as the doctor — who, it must be said, had just driven directly into a tornado in Dallas, and was flung 400+ miles into the Mexican desert — helping a woman in labor as she delivers her baby. It’s great that he was there, but delivering babies is just part of his regular job. (Also, not for nothing, but it seems like the woman in that scene was actually giving birth. Power move, Altman.)
Twenty-four years later, Dr. T’s outlook on women feels like a museum piece, which is fitting for someone who thinks “respecting women” means putting them on a pedestal. In his personal life, he’s beset by dopey men who think meeting a woman for the first time when she’s soaking wet is a harbinger of doom. “You know what your problem is? You don’t understand women,” Dr. T tells his friends, “Women are incapable of being bad luck by themselves — it’s men who make ‘em that way. Women are by nature saints, they’re sacred, and should be treated as such.” We learn that Kate has been struck with a Hestia Complex (not a real complex), which has caused her to regress to a childlike state. As Dr. T explains, the Hestia Complex afflicts upper-class women whose Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs triangles are totally maxed out, and whose husbands love and respect them simply too much.
Eli may have been onto something, though, because upon meeting the soaking-wet golf pro Bree (Hunt), Dr. T’s life goes fully haywire. His patients begin attacking each other, his secretary tries to seduce him, his institutionalized wife asks for a divorce and his daughter takes a break from guiding tours of the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza to warn him that Dee Dee, the near-married Dallas Cowboy, has been secretly dating her bridesmaid, Marilyn (Tyler). Dr. T avoids stepping in a lot of messy situations along the way, but he abstains from doing anything to help any of these women. Are we really to believe that one moistened bird lobbing Titleists was powerful enough for him to forget how to communicate?
Dr. T’s tone is so all over the place that it never hits its stride, even with two full hours to get there. It tries to set up jokes, but never effectively enough that anything happening to Dr. T feels like a punchline. Funny things are happening here, but little of it feels like it’s actually being played for laughs. It’s the worst kind of comedy: one that tries hard to make a point and make us laugh, but feels too jumbled to do either one. If Dr. T is winking at us, it’s not doing a great job of it. The film sets us up to watch Dr. T’s inability to let his understanding of women evolve into becoming an albatross around his neck, but the doctor seems more like a powerless witness in the chaos, only taking action on something at the last minute by throwing himself at the sweeping romance of his fling with Bree. When she turns down his offer to run off into the sunset, free to never work again, she balks: “Why would I want that?”
Thing is, she’s right: why would she want that, especially after the same fate catapulted someone else into a bliss-induced psychosis? The doctor is a relic of old-fashioned patriarchal ideas, but even great sex with a hot doctor can’t make his housewife wishes any more appealing to an even hotter golf pro in her early 30s. It’s not clear if we’re supposed to cheer for Bree’s feminist rebuke, or feel empathy for the scorned doctor, and the fact that this point feels muddled underscores just how half-baked the film’s ideas about gender politics are. It feels so devoid of meaning and message that, at times, it feels unfair to give it credit for any interesting interpretation, because then you’d be stuck asking yourself, “If that’s what they were going for, then why did they do it so poorly?” It gives us lesbian joy and women driven to childlike madness by a frictionless life, but it deploys them so amateurishly that it doesn’t even feel like Altman and Rapp were trying to say anything at all with it, which seems impossible to accomplish for a respected director 30 films into his career.
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