9 / 10
Official trailer
What Women Want is funny from beginning to end, and I love it. Nancy Meyers takes a one-line premise, a man who can hear what women are thinking, and gets ninety-five percent of the available comedy out of it before the plot even gets moving.
Mel Gibson plays Nick Marshall, a Chicago advertising creative who has coasted his whole life on charm aimed exclusively at women who find it charming. Helen Hunt plays Darcy Maguire, brought in over him to run the department he expected to get.
It cost about $70 million and made roughly $374 million, one of the biggest romantic comedies ever released. It’s a 9, and Gibson’s physical comedy is the reason.
The Setup
Nick is the son of a Las Vegas showgirl, raised backstage among women, and he grew up learning exactly how to please them and nothing about how to respect them. He’s good at his job in the way that men who never have to think about anyone else are good at their jobs.
The agency loses ground with female consumers, so management hires Darcy instead of promoting Nick. She hands the team a box of women’s products and tells them to come back with campaigns.
Nick takes the box home, tries everything in it, falls into the bath with a hairdryer, and wakes up hearing women’s thoughts. What started as a humiliation becomes the most valuable professional advantage in Chicago.
The Bathroom Sequence
The extended scene where Nick works through the box of products is among the best pieces of physical comedy of its decade. Pantyhose, wax strips, a home perm, nail polish, and the hairdryer that ends it.
Gibson plays it without a trace of self-protection, and that’s why it works. He’d built a career on action heroes and he throws all of it away for ten minutes of looking ridiculous in a bathroom.
That bathroom scene is a big part of why I rate this a 9. Watching Gibson fight with pantyhose and wax strips makes me laugh harder than most entire comedies manage, and I think he’s never been braver on screen than he is with that home perm.
It also does the film’s setup work. By the time he’s electrocuted, the audience has watched him experience a fraction of what the women in his office do daily, and the joke has an argument buried in it.
For Writers
The product sequence is pure slapstick and it also makes the film’s case, putting Nick through the routines he’s spent a career selling to women. Comedy that carries an argument outlasts comedy that only lands a laugh. When you write a funny scene, ask what it proves about your character or their world, and build the gag so the argument arrives with the punchline. Take your best comic set piece and write down what the reader learns from it. If the answer is nothing, it’s decoration, however funny it is, and decoration is the first thing an editor cuts.
What He Hears
The thoughts are the film’s engine, and Meyers plays them for range. Vanity, exhaustion, boredom, loneliness, contempt, and a running commentary on Nick himself that he has never once suspected.
The best of it is small. A coworker sizing him up and dismissing him in half a second. His assistant’s despair. The coffee-cart woman’s thoughts about her own day, with no room in them for him at all. That’s the film’s real observation: most of what women think has nothing to do with men. Nick has spent his life assuming he’s the subject of the conversation, and the gift shows him he’s a minor character in nearly all of them.
Gibson and Hunt
Gibson is excellent. Nick works because he’s charming and a jerk at the same time, and Gibson plays both without asking the audience to excuse the second. The performance is funnier and more physical than anything else in his filmography. Helen Hunt has the harder and less rewarded part. Darcy is competent, guarded and lonely, and she has to play most of her scenes against a man who is secretly reading her mind. Hunt makes her a person instead of a prize. I think Hunt gets shortchanged whenever people talk about this film. She’s playing a woman whose private thoughts are being read by the man across the desk, and she keeps Darcy dignified through all of it. Without her, the romance would feel like a trick. Marisa Tomei is very funny as a coffee-shop worker Nick sleeps with and then hears the truth about. Alan Alda plays the boss, Ashley Johnson plays Nick’s daughter, and Judy Greer has an early role as an assistant whose thoughts are the film’s darkest thread.
Nancy Meyers
Meyers had written Private Benjamin and Father of the Bride and directed The Parent Trap before this, and she would go on to Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated. She makes films about adults with jobs and houses, and she’s rarely given credit for how well built they are.
Her comedies run on competence. The people in them are good at something, the offices look like offices, and the jokes come out of the work instead of interrupting it. This is her biggest commercial success and, at the time, the highest-grossing film directed by a woman. It’s also the sharpest thing she’s written, because the premise gives her a device for saying out loud what her other films only imply.
For Writers
Meyers builds her comedy on people who are good at their jobs, so the humor comes out of competence colliding with ego instead of out of fools being foolish. Characters who are skilled give you sharper comedy than characters who are stupid. When you write funny people, make them excellent at something and put that excellence under pressure. Give your comic character a real professional skill. Then design the scene where that skill is exactly what gets them into trouble.
The Serious Thread
The film has one subplot it handles with real care. Nick hears a young employee thinking about suicide, and it changes how he treats everybody.
Meyers doesn’t play it for laughs and doesn’t linger on it either. It’s the moment the gift stops being a tool and becomes a responsibility, and it’s the strongest writing in the picture.
This is the decision I respect most in the film. Meyers could have kept the film a lark, and she drops in one thread that isn’t funny at all, handles it gently, and I trust the comedy more afterward. That thread is also what keeps Nick’s turn from feeling unearned. He doesn’t become a better man because he falls in love. He becomes a better man because he can’t unhear what he’s heard.
Where It Wobbles
The advertising plot is thin, and the Nike campaign that resolves it belongs to a different, softer film. The final act does the standard romantic comedy work of the era: a misunderstanding, a resignation, a run through a doorway.
Nick’s theft of Darcy’s ideas is also treated more gently than it deserves, and the film’s fix for it is a speech instead of a consequence. None of it costs the film much. The premise, the performances and the jokes are strong enough that the ending is just where the film stops.
For Writers
Meyers gives her comedy one serious thread, an employee in real trouble, and it lifts the picture without changing its tone. A single note of weight keeps a light story from evaporating. When you write comedy, find one thing in the book that isn’t funny at all and treat it with complete seriousness. Pick the character with the least screen time and give them one real problem. The contrast will make your jokes hit harder, not softer, because the reader knows the stakes are real somewhere in the book.
Craft Note
Craft Note
What Women Want builds its entire comedy on a premise that also happens to be its argument. Nick can hear women’s thoughts and discovers that most of them aren’t about him. The gag and the argument are the same thing, and the film is still funny twenty-five years later because of it. Find the joke that proves what your story believes and put it at the center.
Is What Women Want worth watching?
Yes. It’s funny from start to finish, Gibson’s physical comedy is the best of his career, and the film understands the difference between how men and women move through the same office better than most pictures that set out to explain it.
It’s a 9. My one real gripe is the last act, where Nick steals Darcy’s ideas and gets off with a speech, and the Nike campaign wraps things up in a softer film’s clothes. That’s a small price for an hour I’d put against any studio comedy of its decade, with Gibson throwing his whole action-hero image into a bathtub.
