OxfordPress.com

Grade: D+

Verdict: A chaotic, shrill comedy without a plot.

Details: Starring Richard Gere and Helen Hunt. Rated R for graphic nudity and some sexuality. Two hours, 2 minutes.

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Review: Why can't a woman be more like a man? Though he never vocalizes such a wish, Dr. Sully Travis (Richard Gere), the central figure in "Dr. T and the Women," seems to be following that yearning when he falls for Bree (Helen Hunt).

After all, Bree golfs, she wears sensible shoes, she likes to do the driving herself, and when the doctor asks her to dinner at a nice restaurant, she instead invites him to her place and throws a couple of hefty steaks on the grill. The gal is one heck of a nice guy.

Plus, as played by Hunt, she's almost as manly and expressionless as Gere. The stars have the romantic chemistry of expensive luggage.

That's not the main problem with Robert Altman's new film, written by Anne Rapp, who wrote his last, the lightweight but engaging "Cookie's Fortune." While that film was almost overplotted, "Dr. T" has hardly any plot at all, or believable characters.

The focus is on Sully, aka Dr. T, a wildly popular Dallas gynecologist whose reception area is a buzzing hive of Texas ladies of a certain age, all competing to get him between their legs (professionally speaking, of course). The movie begins with a long scene of their polite catfighting, shot in one take, which is becoming less an Altman signature than a directorial tic.

Back home at his baronial manse, Dr. T is also beset by women: his lovely wife Kate (Farrah Fawcett) and his two grown daughters, Connie (Tara Reid) and Dee Dee (Kate Hudson), who's finalizing arrangements for her wedding. When Kate has a very public meltdown, stripping naked in a crowded shopping mall, her tippling sister Peggy (Laura Dern) becomes unofficial head of the household. And Dr. T starts to find himself drawn toward the butch new assistant golf pro, Bree - who, in one of the film's few surprises, does not turn out to be lesbian. (Another character does, however; the film generates some meager suspense over whether she'll come out or not.)

"Women are incapable of being bad luck by themselves," Dr. T says at one point, one of his many gentlemanly notions that reveals that his estimation of women is so high, he's incapable of thinking of them as actual people. Not that he has any to contend with in a film that turns all its female characters into two-dimensional, lacquered gargoyles.

The always interesting Dern is reduced to a tipsy, over-accessorized caricature. Fawcett does fine as a woman who retreats into a girlish fantasy world (I guess that's a compliment). And as Dr. T's head nurse Carolyn, Shelley Long is the movie's most sympathetic figure, until the script undercuts her with an embarrassing seduction scene. Reid has some amusing moments as a Dealey Plaza tourguide, exclaiming, "That's where J.F.K.'s head exploded." Hudson does her sexy-smirk act, as in "Almost Famous," and comes through without any major career damage. But a blank and doughy Liv Tyler is catastrophic as Hudson's maid-of-honor, sleepwalking through the role.

As for Gere, he's a handsome cipher. Partly that's not his fault. Sully is the passive center of the movie, a good ol' boy being swallowed by a sea of women. It's hard to distinguish the character's mounting frustration from the actor's, as he struggles to make sense of a role without real definition.

As if belatedly realizing they haven't given us anything to watch, Altman and Rapp wind things up with a desperately overblown finale involving a disastrous wedding and a tornado. "Dr. T and the Women" ends with a close-up view of a childbirth. This may be intended as a tribute to the female creative force. But shot with such grisly, full-frontal detail, it seems like the movie's final misogynist touch.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service