DR. T AND THE WOMEN A film review by David N. Butterworth Copyright 2000 David N. Butterworth
** (out of ****)
So it's better than "Ready to Wear" ("Prêt-à-Porter"), but that's about the kindest thing one can say about "Dr. T and the Women," the latest film by director Robert Altman, an over-cast and overextended project which meanders and sallies for near-on two unfocused hours without really getting anywhere. Richard Gere stars as Dr. Sullivan Travis aka Dr. T, a successful Texan gynecologist whose waiting room runneth over with the finest fillies Dallas has to offer, lots of hot flushed gals with big bouffants and lots of lacquer jostling for position in his fur-lined stirrups. In an all-time male fantasy quickly done in by an 80-year-old with a yeast infection, the good doctor prods, probes, and pap smears his way from nine to five yet remains strangely unfulfilled. His cheerleading daughter Dee Dee ("Almost Famous"' Kate Hudson) is about to check in to the honorable estate of marriage while his loopy wife Kate (Farrah Fawcett) checks into the local sanitarium. Dr. T needs something new in his life; something fresh. Enter Bree, a golf pro played by Helen Hunt. "You're not like any woman I've ever met," he tells her to her face. And if a gynecologist tells you there are no two alike then you have to believe there are no two alike. With a screenplay by Anne Rapp (who penned Altman's previous film, the over-cast and overextended "Cookie's Fortune"), "Dr. T and the Women" follows pretty much the same path--a lot of talent drowning under Lyle Lovett's Texas twangs. Any film which opens with an implicit pelvic exam and closes with an explicit live birth is trying to say something, but the stuff in the middle, alas, doesn't amount to much of anything.
-- David N. Butterworth dnb@dca.net
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