How does the original What Women Want hold up two decades later?
For the second-highest-grossing romantic comedy ever made, What Women Want hasn’t had much cultural staying power. The Mel Gibson-Helen Hunt vehicle mostly feels like a relic from a very different era, but it’s back in the consciousness again thanks to the recently released What Men Want, a gender-flipped reimagining starring Taraji P. Henson. So what’s it like to revisit What Women Want 19 years later? Well, it’s mostly a reminder that 2000 was a very long time ago. What Women Want isn’t exactly a problematic mess—or at least not nearly as much as it could’ve been. Its “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” jokes are rather stale (there’s an extended sequence where the whole joke is just that Gibson is wearing tights and nail polish), but those gags were dismissed as stale even in contemporaneous reviews of the film. In other ways, however, rewatching What Women Want through modern eyes raises some uncomfortably meta questions about who gets redemption arcs.
It’s really hard to revisit What Women Want without revisiting the troubled legacy of Mel Gibson. (His Icon Productions company also co-produced the film.) What Women Want is Gibson’s second-highest-grossing film as an actor, behind only Signs, which was released two years later and served as both the peak and the last hurrah of Gibson’s run as a beloved leading man. He went on to find massive box office success but also quite a bit of controversy as the writer and director of 2004’s The Passion Of The Christ. Then he made some virulently anti-Semitic remarks while being arrested for drunk driving in 2006, and a few years later, was recorded making some shockingly violent and racist threats to his girlfriend. His career appeared to be over.
Except then it wasn’t. Gibson crept back into acting roles as lovable rogues in the Expendables franchise and Daddy’s Home 2. He earned massive critical praise for directing 2016’s Hacksaw Ridge, and happily attended the Academy Awards, where he was able to bathe in the glory of the film’s six nominations, including one for Best Director. He currently has several acting roles, a Passion Of The Christ sequel, and a Wild Bunch remake on the docket. In a 2018 Vox article, Constance Grady argues that Mel Gibson established the blueprint for “a #MeToo comeback,” which other publicly disgraced men can now follow. So, yes, watching a film where Gibson plays a horrific human being who’s redeemed for exhibiting the bare minimum of decency isn’t exactly what I’d call rom-com comfort food in 2019. Although What Women Want sets out to be a movie about how important it is for men to listen to and empathize with women, in the end it plays more like a movie about how easy it is for men to be forgiven for their past transgressions.
Gibson stars as Nick Marshall, a misogynistic Chicago advertising executive and “man’s man” who’s magically granted the ability to hear women’s thoughts and gets a rude wakeup call about what they actually think of him. It’s a promising, if goofy, premise, and the film’s best scenes come in its first half, as Nick gets a crash course in the female psyche. (That includes overhearing a French-accented miniature poodle demand of its owner, “Monsieur, I need to poop!” which is a supremely dumb joke that never fails to make me laugh.) When we first see Nick strut through the office, he seems to be the king of the castle, effortlessly charming every woman he meets. When he makes that same walk with his new power, however, Nick realizes that almost every woman in his office secretly hates him. They feign laughter at his grossly sexist jokes and remain polite when he treats them as assistants, not colleagues. Internally, though, they’re ripping him to shreds. Even those who are won over by his suave good looks know he’s an asshole. Nick thinks he’s manipulating the world, but it’s more like the world is begrudgingly bending to appease him.
It’s a smart use of the film’s conceit, with plenty of meaty stuff to dig into—more so than in What Men Want, actually, where Henson’s character mostly just gets confirmation that the boys’ club mentality she’d long ago noticed at her sports agency is, in fact, real. And in its best moments, What Women Want is fairly insightful about the polite face women are forced to put on at work so as to not ruffle the feathers of their male bosses and coworkers.
Yet What Women Want is also pretty confused. As an explanation for Nick’s misogyny, the film features a cheeky prologue about the fact that his mother was a Las Vegas showgirl and Nick grew up backstage, coddled by scantily clad maternal figures. What Women Want takes it as a given that growing up in a female-heavy environment where his only male role models regularly sexually harassed his mom would automatically turn Nick into a cruel misogynist, which certainly doesn’t strike me as a natural chain of events. (The wonderful Support The Girls has, I think, a much more realistic portrait of what it might be like to be a young boy growing up among women in an environment where their sexuality is commodified.) It’s also a little strange how baffled Nick later seems to be by mascara and pantyhose given that he grew up in a women’s dressing room.
The film’s most confused element is Darcy McGuire (a reliably endearing Helen Hunt), Nick’s boss and eventual love interest, who’s hired by the ad agency to reach the ever-growing market of female consumers that Nick has so far failed to capture with his “tits and ass” approach to advertising. Nick first hears rumors that Darcy is a “bitch on wheels,” but when she finally shows up, she’s actually preternaturally kind and thoughtful. It’s a sharp commentary on how easily successful women can earn reputations for being the “man-eating Darth Vader of the ad world,” no matter how gently and supportively they give feedback to their male employees. In fact, it’s Darcy’s slight timidity about giving her opinion and speaking her mind that allows Nick to swoop in and steal her ideas as part of his plan to sabotage her career and steal her job.