The doctor's delusion

DR T AND THE WOMEN

Cert 12, 122 mins

FOR his last few " crowd " movies, Robert Altman has explored the social class that consumes rather than produces: the Hollywood wheeler-dealers of The Player, the ragtag-andbobtail mob of Pret a Porter and now the ladies-who-lunch set in Dr T and the Women. Conspicuous consumption is the ironic countertone of a movie whose eponymous hero earns his living in consultant procreation.

Dr Sullivan Travis, known to Dallas s superrich and leisured class as Dr T, is a society gynaecologist. In the eight-minute opening sequence set in his clinic, the women besiege him like a pop star. It is an overture of restless camera movement conducted without a cut amid a crescendo of peremptory tongues the sort of sequence of overlapping sound and crisscrossing movement that is Altman s virtuoso trademark.

Dr T is Richard Gere. He looks as handsome as a silver-plated mascot on a custom-made automobile, and purrs like one, too.

He worships the women with his plastic-gloved hands like a curator, as if they and their hidden parts were art objects. By nature, he observes, women are saints. You can hear the gods overhead chuckling. By the stormy end of this highly entertaining film, Dr T has come to recognise women are furies. Too late, he discovers his personal and professional life is in their hands; and they come near to destroying it and him.

Altman' s context, virtually all-female and insultingly affluent, has made his film suspect, even reviled by some critics. Not this one, though. Only one of the women in his movie it may be the most populous single-gender comedy, certainly the best-dressed one of its genre, since George Cukor directed The Women in 1939 does a stroke of work. And Bree Davis (Helen Hunt) doesn t exactly break her back. As the new pro at the smart golf club, she sets the ball on the tee for Dr T to drive off. But compared with his own family circle and clients, she is a Stakhanovite. His wife (Farrah Fawcett) rings the first alarm bell when she goes off her elegant rocker in the shopping mall, strips off (outside the Godiva chocolatier), abandons lizard- skin shoes, bag, pashmina and the rest of her kit and prances nude in an ornamental pool. She is whisked off to a psychiatric clinic, suffering from the Hestia Complex , a rever-sionary state of childishness induced by having too much of everything: love, comforts and, especially, shopping.

A film that shows a section of Dallas women as pampered residents of a social harem whose menfolk keep them like trophies attracts an easy charge of misogyny. But it s a charge that sticks only if you re the sort of myopic gender-defender who refuses to acknowledge that some of your sorority are backsliding nitwits, over-privileged and underemployed. I m told that in Dallas itself, whose society matrons appear as extras, the film was judged accurate to a T.

THE collapse of the good doctor s potty wife starts a chain reaction in his all-female family circle.

Turning for help to Bree, he discovers this independent woman has her own feminist agenda and his salvation isn t on it. With the rising storm of tragicomic revelations, Dr T is forced to revise his restricted view of women, largely gained when they ve got their legs apart and their feet in the stirrups as prone recipients of his tender probing care. The film ends with a real storm that s a bravura bit of filmmaking, a Texas twister that transports Dr T, by a stroke of magical realism, into a much more primitive community. There he serves the same ends of procreation as before, but this time observes the Shakespearian advice tendered, admittedly a bit late in the day, by another historically hag-ridden man who serves a woman too well to bring forth men-children only .

It is sometimes hard, I admit, to watch a film that s totally committed to a satire of the rich and foolish without feeling there are worthier targets of Altman s mockery. It is no Short Cuts, his cross-section of a wider swathe of Los Angeles society that also shook that errant community, literally, into sobriety by another elemental event, an earth tremor.

But even in Dr T s class indictment, Altman finds room to widen his viewfinder and depict Dallas, never mind its millionaires, as a sort of guarded community turned in on itself, where the only act of political awareness is naming a new freeway after a woman the menfolk vote for Jayne Mansfield and where the JFK assassination has been degraded into tourist mythology, a Conspiracy Museum, and an X on the road where the president s head exploded .

The huge cast serves Altman s non-stop choreography, coming and going and intersecting, without a misstep: Laura Dern as Dr T s alcoholic sister-in-law, Shelley Long as his overly adoring receptionist, Tara Reid as his conspiracy-theorist daughter, Kate Hudson as a bride-tobe and Liv Tyler as her lesbian lover, and a whole gaggle of patients among whom I must single out veteran actress Dorothy Deavers s cane-toting old biddy in a cloche hat.

Richard Gere is faultless, too: his skin-deep charm, that has set my teeth on edge many a time, for once provides the perfect patina on a hollow man.

Copyright 2001
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