Artisan Entertainment Presents a Sandcastle 5 Production. A Robert Altman Film. Produced by Robert Altman, James McLindon; Written by Annie Rapp; Directed by Robert Altman.
Opens October 20, 2000.
Five hundred milligrams of acid, 200 milligrams of bile, and 200 milligrams of laughing gas are Robert Altman's prescription for Dr. T & The Women. It's an hilarious satire on the upscale world of the nouveau riche, lunch-doing, credit card-abusing species of the modern woman. It's often dead out hilarious and, more than a few times, a tad misogynist. Still, you don't have to hang out at sports bars all day to notice there's a perceptible backlash against the exalted p.c. notion of the superiority of women, and Altman's acidic comedy is a drenching satire of some of the foibles of the fairer sex.
A former publisher of mine, who founded Women in Film, used to take a Valium before she had to deal with all those women at WIF meetings. During those times, she told me, an assistant at the time, to keep them amused while she braced herself. Her name also started with a T. She would surely need something if she saw this film.
Centered on an ob/gyn office in the diamond-dripping parts of good old Dallas, Dr. T gyrates around one handsome, cool and nicely graying doc (Richard Gere) who tends to the needs of some of Dallas' highest-strung and well-tended women. Dr. T, as he's affectionately called by his legions of women patients, is wildly popular, as much for his caring manner, as he is for the down-low spots he finds with his instruments. Such bawdy comic indelicacies are indicative of the provocative nature of Altman's sometimes less than delicate probes into the psyche of women persons, as Dr. T's rattled female secretary refers to the yapping, fussing hordes of patients that clog Dr.T's catty, gossipy waiting room. The gentle sex is anything but here; not exactly a scoop to the world outside of the alternative weeklies or out of the cloistered environs of enlightened Hollywood.
Like most Altman films, Dr. T's a contextual mash of volatile and idiosyncratic characters who are bonded by a polar institution, in this case, the doctor's office; and, in the Altman-escapadery, T ambulates toward one climactic showdown. In this case, the characters are not bonded by their trek to Nashville, nor their participation in a snooty Paris fashion show, but, rather, that they'll all be showing up soon at the wedding of Dr.T's eldest daughter, a Neiman Marcus-ean looker who dabbles at becoming that epitome of female pulchritude, a Cowboys' cheerleader. In short, Altman's comic operating room is the milieu and mindset of the pampered female trophy girl, and screenwriter Annie Rabb has sagely set it smack dab in the epicenter of the good old gal/glittery world of upscale Dallas. In short, it's not the kind of movie that a pc critic from an alternative weekly is likely to embrace because Dr.T does not present women as superior begins of sensitivity, intellect or morals. It's more akin to Sex and The City and the current bestseller 4 Blondes in its depiction of the makings and maneuverings of the post-Cosmo girl.
Admittedly, Altman does lay it on thick and sometimes obnoxiously harsh: Every behavior and type is taken to the extreme, from Dr. T's have-it-all wife (Farrah Fawcett)who is undergoing a nervous breakdown, and, natch, has to strip in a fountain at a Tiffany-type shopping mall, as well as the fact that beneath the wedding finery and fluff, his eldest daughter is lesbian. Despite these leering lapses, Dr. T is deliciously amusing, especially when Altman is not doing his thoracic surgeon routine, and chopping straight at our funny bone.
Essentially, Dr. T is a straightman and the touchstone character, a man so docile and understanding that, after a while, we come to be put off by him. With this character, Altman has shrewdly stacked the deck,