# Dr. T & the Women (2000)

### reviewed by
Scott Renshaw

    DR. T & THE WOMEN
    (Artisan)
    Starring:  Richard Gere, Helen Hunt, Farrah Fawcett, Laura Dern, Tara
    Reid, Kate Hudson, Shelley Long, Liv Tyler.
    Screenplay:  Anne Rapp.
    Producers:  Robert Altman and James McLindon.
    Director:  Robert Altman.
    MPAA Rating:  R (nudity, adult themes, profanity)
    Running Time:  122 minutes.
    Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.

DR. T & THE WOMEN kicks off with one of those trademarked Robert Altman sequences of choreographed cacophany. We're in the waiting room of Dallas OB/GYN Dr. Sullivan "Sully" Travis (Richard Gere) -- known to all simpy as Dr. T -- where head nurse Carolyn (Shelley Long) tries to maintain order despite a swarm of patients waiting long past their spot on the doctor's overbooked schedule. It's a brilliantly economical way to set up a potentially fascinating protagonist. Dr. T loves women so much (in a purely spiritual, madonna-half of the whole madonna/whore thing sort of way) that he just can't say no to any of them. The women love Dr. T so much that they're willing to endure tremendous inconvenience for his personalized stirrup-side manner. What a great character to study: a man who idealizes women in a cultural setting -- upper-class Southerners -- where plenty of the women are just fine with being idealized.

Only two things from that waiting room sequence forward keep DR. T & THE WOMEN from being a provocative movie experience: Richard Gere, and just about everything else. Altman's film itself is as tumultuous and unfocused as Dr. T's life in the film, which starts getting complicated when his wife Kate (Farrah Fawcett) has a mental breakdown and is placed in a psychiatric hospital. Kate's illness coincides with preparations for the wedding of the Travis's oldest daughter Dee Dee (Kate Hudson), as well as an extended stay by Kate's sister Peggy (Laura Dern) and her three little girls. And to make matters even more unstable, there's the new country club golf pro named Bree (Helen Hunt), who turns Dr. T's head with her unique independent streak.

Altman and screenwriter Anne Rapp make a huge mistake early on when they define Kate's rare condition, and along with it Dr. T's own character flaw. He's a man who loves too much, we learn, giving the women in his life absolutely everything because he delights in being their guardian, and scarcely even sees them as flesh and bone. This Act One diagnosis underlines every action Dr. T makes for the viewer's benefit: ah, note is instinctively sexist-gallant attempts to do everything for Bree! And note further how he seems smitten by her insistence on taking charge!

You'd think it might underline things a bit for Dr. T himself, especially since he gets the dialogue explaining his wife's condition. Instead, he spends the next several days of story time in a well-intentioned fog, manifested in Gere's beatifically squinting countenance. Gere has never been one of our more subtle actors, but here he simply refuses to give Dr. T's pathological sanctification of women any edge. Altman and Rapp let him off the hook by implicitly suggesting he's just a man tossed about by the forces of estrogen rathern than an example of a particularly unhealthy attitude. And it doesn't help that almost every one of the film's dozen or so female characters is written as a cartoon -- Dern as the champagne-swilling, unhappily married belle; Janine Turner as a pushy hypochondriac; Tara Reid as Dr. T's conspiracy buff younger daughter -- making it even easier to see the befuddled Dr. T as the victim rather than part of the problem.

This misguided characterization reaches its peak during a late revelation about the personal life of one of Dr. T's family members. It should have been an opportunity to let Dr. T's true colors emerge, to show him rocked by the notion that women aren't all what he believes them to be. Instead, it's a cheap opportunity to make him almost absurdly sensitive and understanding, when understanding is so clearly what he lacks. DR. T & THE WOMEN flirts with the kind of symbolism and narrative complexity that can make it seem deep -- be sure to bring an abacus to count the number of connections between water and female sexuality -- but it's actually terribly shallow where it counts. Without an actor willing to make Dr. T a sexist anachronism in need of some self-awareness, the film is reduced to a two-hour exhibition of limp farce. How depressing to see that wonderfully evocative waiting room turned into the place where the big payoff is someone getting tripped and banging her head on a coffee table.

         On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 female troubles:  4.

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