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Dr T and the Women (2000) More at IMDb Pro »

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243 comments in total

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14 out of 14 people found the following comment useful :-
No really, I like this movie, 24 September 2005

Author: Shane Pangburn from United States

I'm sorry, but I like this movie. It might just be my defense of Robert Altman, but I think that this is a good comedy. Dr. T who devotes his life to taking care of women, but never considers how they could take care of themselves. He loves everything about women, and women love him. However, nothing he can do can protect them in the end.

The problem is that this film was presented as a movie for women: a date movie that you can drag a boyfriend or husband to in order to prove love and devotion. The film is actually examining women, their needs and relationships with or without a strong male figure. This isn't a chick flick; it's an analytic comedy. So, the intended movie date turns out to be a disappointment for both parties who have no idea what to expect.

The only positive aspect of this whole misunderstanding is that now, years later, Dr. T ends up on the cheap rack at any DVD store. So don't rent it, buy it, give it another look and even if you don't like it, sell it for even cheaper. When this movie is available for less than a dollar, no one will have any excuse not to watch it. Several of the people will end up actually liking it.

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16 out of 18 people found the following comment useful :-
Cuts Like A Knife!, 26 June 2001

Author: meeza (themeezaman@hotmail.com) from Miami, Fl

`What's up Doc?' I will tell you what is up! Set your appointment book and schedule a visit to see `Dr. T & The Women'- the latest film by Director Robert Altman. Richard Gere stars as a gynecologist who must deal with the neurotic women in his life: a mentally-impaired childlike wife, a witty golf pro mistress, a champagne sipping sister, a lesbian daughter, a kennedy-assassination obsessed control freak daughter, and of course his hypochondriac-impatient patients. The film is full of `altmanrisms'- an overlapping dialogue, a catastrophic occurrence in a public event, and of course satirical viewpoints of a certain profession. Gere saves his career again with a remarkable performance. However, it was Laura Dern's work as the champagne sipping sister that still hungover in my mind after I watched the movie. It was a very critical condition that academy award voters overlooked her brilliant acting. Altman again is able to get some well-known actors to appear in his movies- Farrah Fawcett, Helen Hunt, Tara Reid, Liv Tyler, Kate Hudson, and Shelley Long are the other female players involved in this one. The one headache I had with `Dr T. & The Women' was the somber characterizations of Dr. T's male buddies. These characters should have been rescheduled to another movie. All in all, Director Robert Altman (in my viewpoint one of the smartest directors of all time) was able to complete a successful cinematic operation on `Dr T. & The Women.' So take two hours, go see this movie, and call me in the morning. **** Good

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14 out of 15 people found the following comment useful :-
Satisfying, But Not Great Altman, 20 December 2003

Author: gbheron from Washington, DC

Robert Altman appreciates women. It shows in his movies; women are often the main characters, and his films offer up a variety of interesting roles for actresses. Dr. T and the Women is almost entirely about women, modern day wealthy Texas women. Richard Gere plays Dr. Sully Travis a very successful and popular Dallas gynecologist. Not only is he surrounded by women all day at work, but his family consists entirely of women. Only a couple of male buddies enter into his closed, female dominated life. And like all good Altman movies there are plenty of quirky characters and intersecting plotlines.

The problem is that the plotlines aren't that interesting or original. Dr. T's wife develops a rare mental disorder that affects only the wealthy, and must be institutionalized. The new female golf pro comes on to Dr. T, as does his nurse. His soon-to-be-married daughter is slowly realizing that she may be a lesbian. And so on.

For Altman fans, Dr. T and the Women is not a bad rental. The director has done better, but it's still Altman. Others, less interested, might want to give this a pass.

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20 out of 28 people found the following comment useful :-
Scrambled Ovaries, 14 October 2000
Author: tedg (tedg@FilmsFolded.com) from Virginia Beach

Robert Altman is frustratingly inconsistent, and here is at his worst. His very personal style has three characteristics:

1. Many-threaded storylines and characters, many of which raise questions that are not answered in the play. When done well, you get the impression of moving through the world with a curious voyeurism, dipping into many lives which are intriguing enough to learn more about. Except for the youngest daughter, none of these women are worth digging more into. The misogynism could have been an advantage; here it is cheap.

2. Spontaneous acting. Altman doesn't tell his actors what to do, trusting them to bring something fresh. In the best case, the differing visions of the actors add to the manyhued effect described above. But you need powerful actors like he had in "Cookie's Fortune." These folks, some of whom are fine when given direction, simply can't synthesize.

3. Wonderful tracking shots (which move from character to character so enhance the two effects noted above). Check out the first shot in "The Player." That alone is worth the admission. Here, we have a busily choreographed shot at the beginning and a dizzy pullback at the end, but neither to any useful effect.

Avoid this film. The master was asleep.

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10 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
If you dig Robert Altman's style, it's worth it, 20 May 2002

Author: Lumpenprole from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

spoilers

I'm definitely fond of this movie. Richard Gere comes off a serious person and his acting is perfect, which I wasn't expecting at all. The film was very well made and ended on a note I thought was much more sincere than anything I've seen in movies recently. The dialogue and plot took me two sittings to absorb.

Having said that, I gotta admit, people will hate this film. Like most Altman pieces, the plot is not driven by outside events so much as it's driven by how characters feel and act towards each other. Dr. T is a rather extreme example of this, where almost nothing happens but the spectacular collapse of a wedding, a failed relationship, and a short-story magic ending. The arc of the plot is the growth of the Richard Gere character from a needy person who has been unconsciously trying to make himself the center of a kingdom of dependent women into a person who finds new meaning in his work with people. Dr. T begins the movie as a man who is perfectly happy. He's an overwhelming professional success with an attractive family and nothing but more of expensive happiness to look forward to. But he's immersed in demanding women. He has spent his whole life trying to put women on pedestals so that he can bask in their praise and affection. This isn't exactly evil, but the movie shows how his life begins to unravel as a result of this basically sexist outlook he has devoted his life to. After what must have been decades of relentless smothering, his wife reverts to a childlike state. (An expensive psychiatrist assures him that it's from having a life that's `too perfect,' which is probably a way of telling him what's wrong without saying exactly why.) His heroic efforts as an OB/GYN have led his patients to make unreasonable demands on him that make his job a hell. He appears to have gotten the needs of his daughters backwards as far as which one requires more attention. His time-bomb sister-in-law has moved into his home with her gaggle of little girls. Just as all of this comes apart, he runs into a woman from outside Dr. T's kingdom. Helen Hunt plays a woman who doesn't need him and won't let herself rely on his courtesies and affections. He tells her frankly that he's never met any woman like her, which is a sad thing really. Then it all falls apart and in his lowest moment he's wrenched away from the mess he's made of his life by a tornado out of The Wizard of Oz (people can believe in Yoda, clips of ammo that never empty, accept a deluge of frogs from the sky, and that a man can be just a little jarred after shooting himself in the head to kill Tyler Durden, but a magic tornado is too much…) Dr. T finds himself without his expensive status symbols or his dependent entourage of hypochondriacs, in a place without even a phone. He does his job and he doesn't even get a girl. It's a boy and it's all new to him and that fills him with joy.

There are other Altman traits will drive people up the wall - the plot that feels like sprawl the first time through, the lack of signposts to obviously sympathetic characters, insistence on sorting moral ambiguities, doing satire in a PC world where even the shopping classes can't be made fun of, the layers of dialogue and so on. What I try to tell people that are new to Altman is that he pretty much invented the TV drama forms we respect. E.R. and Hill Street Blues and any number of TV dramas thrive off Altman's formula - which is to pick an interesting locale, drop a ton of characters in, and set them in motion. Events happen, but the real drama is watching the characters interact every week. The Hollywood film industry has moved in the opposite direction, which is soap opera. There you take a big cast of canned personalities, drop them in an upper income setting and write some love story or coming-of-age bit around the quest/monsters/gun fights that actually make them move from scene to scene. Neither is inherently better, but the multiplex has gravitated towards the second so completely that most people are utterly confused when seeing the first.

Unless you're interested in seeing a movie about a man who is forced to change the values he built his life on with the best intentions, you'll hate it. If you dig seeing that dramatized, Dr. T is fairly unique.

Also, I wish Altman had some pull with whoever is doing the advertising for his films. Marketing Dr. T as a screwball comedy and Gosford Park as a whodunit has probably done more damage to his reputation than anything else. Illiterate marketing is almost as big a problem as trailers that give the best parts of movies away - I wish the studios would be a little more thoughtful about it.

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14 out of 20 people found the following comment useful :-
"Dr. P.U.", 14 March 2002

Author: smelt

This is only the second time I've been irritated enough to write a review, the other was "Trixie."

First of all, I'm a fan of "The Player" and of "Short Cuts," among other Altman movies. So when I was at first annoyed and angered by the beginning of this movie, I passed it off to his soon-to-come deeper agenda, which in "Dr. T..." never arrives.

I loathe this movie. Let me count the ways:

1. (Most importantly) We are led to empathize with a man who believes he loves too much, too hard, and hence, the consequences. This, if played out, would be great, as he gets his come-uppance, realizes the self-delusion and that his life and ways with women is a lie. But that's not what happens. We are supposed to feel sorry for and sympathize with him the entire way, even as he cheats, avoids true responsibility and, despite what the ending is supposed to say, never changes. Rather than the boy-birth being a sign of evolution/change/enlightenment, it debunks all that came before, in fact saying that all these women were the problem all along. Instead of being a witty examination of flawed Dallas women, it concludes with a tacked-on non-epiphany, which by its very existence makes everything before it misogynistic, and none of the characters likeable.

2. Watch how many times Altman works in gratuitous nudity, like an 11 yr. old peeping tom. When he shows Janine Turner's derriere-crack, at the end of her scene, it's not Richard Gere following it with his eyes, it's the CAMERA, as if to say, "hey, look at this" -- like a little elbow in our sides.

3. He does the same thing often at the end of scenes, swinging the camera with a wink to pick up a sign, a heavy-handed metaphor or scene-link that is beginning film school pretentious artifice at its worst.

4. The editing and cinematography again is of the film-school variety, and at often times is like a rough cut.

5. Helen Hunt, who for years has been trying to convince us she's newly "sexy," is so self-conscious that we never can buy into any kind of character. I am sick of her flinging her hair.

6. The camera holds so long on the golf sequences, as if to say - "these actors really can play golf," which they really don't very well. But it becomes a call-attention lingering as opposed to a mere setting for dialogue.

7. The overly intrusive soundtrack by Lyle Lovett may be close to the worst in history. Not only does it blot out large sequences of dialogue, and call attention to itself mindlessly at every turn, it actually has lyrics which say exactly what's going on in the scene.

8. The writing and dialogue are extremely sophomoric; very few times do the people seem real in what they're saying, and often they resort to movie cliche-speak.

9. Gere has a few good real moments, but the direction hurts him as well.

10. Altman's trademark "everyone speaking at once," in this movie is contrived and annoying.

11. (And maybe worst of all) this movie made me replay all the movies of Altman that I really like and see that many of tendencies above that I criticize are prevalent in ALL of his movies, now tempering my enjoyment of them. I now see a old lecher with a misogynistic bent and an arrested development, calling attention to his weaknesses in a pretentious and juvenile way.

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8 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :-
Don't expect "Pretty Woman", 27 August 2004
Author: Rachel-20 from California

If you sit down to this movie expecting your average romantic comedy you're going to come away, as many of the reviewers here did, befuddled and probably seriously disappointed. I'm no high-art film critic, but I had the advance warning, of sorts, of having watched the previews on the VHS edition of this movie (of all things), which let me know not to expect anything ordinary from it. Plus it's Robert Altman, right? So I went into it expecting not to take things at face value -- and that's what you have to do to enjoy this movie. The idea is that you have this man who treats women with love, respect, and chivalry. He is surrounded by demanding women all day long, and yet the focus on the individual patients whose encounters with him we witness shows the truth of something he says to his friends: every woman is unique. And then we see the different ways in which the women respond: His office manager falls in love with him. His patients demand more and more (and are very well-directed). His wife goes insane because she's loved too much (a diagnosis as obviously unrealistic as hers HAS to have been written into the story for a reason). His daughters rely on him, shock him, disappoint him. His sister-in-law takes advantage of his hospitality while drinking herself into a stupor. His girlfriend (who is kind of a man's woman) rejects his chivalrous overtures ("I'll do it! I'll get it!"), is the only self-sufficient woman in the film, and ultimately rejects his offer for an interdependent relationship. All these combine to create a world whose stresses pile up until a surreal conclusion whisks Dr. T away to a completely different world... where straight away he's put back to work, and he delivers a boy. And who can blame him for being relieved.

Overall this is a movie I'm glad I saw once; it was an interesting experience. Kudos to Richard Gere for probably the best acting I've ever seen him do.

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4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
Hit and miss Altman, but some master touches, 22 July 2001
Author: Geofbob from London, England

Like much of Robert Altman's work, this is a hit and miss movie, but worth seeing for some good performances, several genuinely funny scenes, and some of the master's typical ensemble sequences with all hell breaking loose while everybody talks at once! It is probably unhelpful to approach it as though it was a full-blooded satire on wealthy Texas women. For a start, the target is too easy - like the floating and walking birds Dr T and his buddies seem to think it's fair to shoot at - and in any case the focus of the film is not the Women of the title, but Dr T.

Richard Gere gives a typically charming and understated, performance as Dr T (for Travis), who is surrounded by women whom he likes and respects in private life, and cares for in his professional life as a gynecologist, but no more understands than most men. Farrah Fawcett gives a touching portrayal as his wife, who retreats into childhood to escape his smothering affection. Helen Hunt, as an independently-minded, intelligent golf pro, provides a refreshing change - both for Dr T and the audience - from the empty-headed shopaholics who people much of the movie. Laura Dern, Kate Hudson and Shelley Long sparkle as, respectively, Dr T's sister-in-law, daughter and receptionist. (As we might expect from Altman, the city of Dallas also plays a leading role; and the best casting is definitely that of Eric Ryan as the "birth baby"; Eric enters the IMDb actors data base at the tender age of zero!)

This is a long way from the vintage Altman of Mash, Nashville and The Player; but is still richer than most Hollywood fare.

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5 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :-
Is 'allegory' and 'whimsy' just totally lost on people these days, or something???!, 28 November 2004

Author: Howlin Wolf from Oldham, Gtr Manchester, England.

... It doesn't so much 'depress' me that people don't like this film, as it does when I find out the REASONS people dislike it. I didn't even feel moved to comment until I realized the staggering lack of depth that's comprised in most people's criticisms here. I figured that I'd just watched a pleasant enough comedic trifle. Apparently not.

People, dislike this film by all means - it's hardly the best I've ever seen - but don't vilify it for the very qualities that were wholly intentional. I mean, how many of the 'naysayers' here have even the SLIGHTEST passing knowledge of Frank Capra???! There were odd moments here and there in this that struck me as being decidedly Capraesque...

Gere is PERFECT as the guy who - without arrogance - is convinced that he can be every woman's knight in shining armour... Trouble is, they don't NEED any 'convincing'! So, what exactly happens when you take a guy like this and show him a woman who is, by the best information available, completely self-sufficient? All I can say is: If this scenario even slightly intrigues you, then watch it and find out... !

I think the ending is very fitting, too... (e-mail or PM me for reasons if you disagree; as I don't wish to spoil too much for the good people that are yet to watch!) Rather 'Buddhist' - so surely appropriate for a man of Mr. Gere's persuasion... ?!

(7/10, or ***/***** in profile ratings system.)

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3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Not What I Expected, but I Loved it..., 27 December 2005

Author: ijonesiii from United States

I may be in the minority here, but I loved DR. T AND THE WOMEN, mainly because it wasn't what I expected. Looking at the title and the cast, I expected a smarmy sex comedy about a doctor who is irresistible to all of his patients and is running from exam room to exam room getting his clothes torn off and then I saw that Robert Altmann directed it and decided to give it a look. I found this film to be an intelligent and winning comedy about a doctor who actually loves and respects his female patients as well as the various females in his life. Richard Gere has rarely been more appealing on screen as the doc of the title and he is surrounded by an impressive group of actresses at the top of their game. Helen Hunt plays the golf pro he falls for. Laura Dern is very funny as his alcoholic sister-in-law. Shelley Long has some funny moments as his office manager who harbors a secret crush on her boss. Kate Hudson and Tara Reid play Doctor T's daughters and in a brief but memorable cameo, Farrah Fawcett as Gere's mentally unstable wife who ends up institutionalized. This film is a little more structured than most of Altmann's previous work and doesn't require the usual work necessary to enjoy an Altmann film and the straight forward scripting is a big help. I know a lot of people found the ending troubling, but to me it was classic Altmann...a little crazy, a little off-center, and leaving questions unanswered...something we Altmann fans have come to expect of him.

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