Dr. T and the Women
With Richard Gere, Helen Hunt, Farrah Fawcett.
US, 2000, 35mm, color, 122 min.
Altman’s first film of the 21st century is a bustling but mid-tempo screwball comedy that takes its seemingly willfully dubious central conceit—Richard Gere’s mild-mannered gynecologist navigating a sea of high-strung blonde women against the colorful backdrop of upper-class Dallas—to a logical extreme, taunting its protagonist’s self-professed cosmic balance with a series of increasingly surreal twists and turns. Altman was never one to shy away from playing with fire, and the borderline unkind characterizations of many of the females here offers distinct proof of that taste for provocation, but Dr. T and the Women is nonetheless motored by the animated performances of actresses like Shelley Long, Laura Dern, Kate Hudson, Tara Reid and Helen Hunt, while the men, Gere included, mostly dissolve into the background as ineffectual witnesses to the constant multidirectional movement of the women around them. Dallas is presented as a place of glossy surfaces (malls, golf clubs, offices, museums and parkways all shine with the same pastel spotlessness) and even glossier personalities—an ideal setting for this affectionate burlesque of moneyed privilege, myopia and hypocrisy.
PRECEDED BY
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Girl Talk
Directed by Robert Altman.
With Bobby Troup.
US, 1966, digital video, color, 3 min.
Copy source: UCLA
Altman brought singer Bobby Troup and a group of models to the hip Beverly Hills boutique Paraphernalia for this Color Sonic short set to Troup’s hit single.
Part of film series
Screenings from this program
Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson
Vincent & Theo
Fool for Love
Prêt-à-porter
California Split
Thieves Like Us
A Perfect Couple
A Prairie Home Companion
O.C. and Stiggs
That Cold Day in the Park
Corn's-A-Poppin'
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
The Gingerbread Man
Dr. T and the Women
Come Back to the 5 and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
