A Closer Look at "What Women Want"

The 2001 movie What Women Want starring Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt was a wonderful comedy. However, there is more than meets the eye with this one. There is an underlying dramatic theme with a more serious tone. If you really pay attention, you can even catch onto the moral of the story.

A key to understanding the main character, Nick Marshall, is given in the beginning of the story. His ex-wife describes him as "a man's man". He is the "the leader of the pack" that other men admire and try to emulate. He gets his personality as a self-involved womanizer from the way he was raised. His showgirl mother brought him up in Las Vegas. Beautiful women who adored him and the men who took advantage of them surrounded him constantly. As you could only imagine, he got a very skewed view of what life is really like. As a result, he became a womanizer in his adult life. He gets no real idea of how to deal with women, and never understood what they thought of him.

His life is turned upside down by Darcy McGuire (Helen Hunt) when she gets his job, or at least the one he believes he deserves. His outlook on life gave him the edge he needed to be at the top of his game in a male driven market. When the market changed to include a buyer's market of mostly women, his boss decided that Nick couldn't handle it.

Considering Nick's outlook on life, he is understandably shaken by this major change in his life. He loses the control that he once had. All this changed for him when a freak accident left him with the ability to hear women's thoughts. He starts out frightened by all these new thoughts that he doesn't want to hear. Then he gets the worse advice anyone could have ever given him. They remind him that his newly acquired power is just what he needed to get the advantage over his new competitor, Darcy.

Nick looks at this newfound power from the point of view of an egotistical man who loves women. He does not realize what this power will do for him. In the beginning, once he learns how to combine this power with his charm, he takes advantage of situations. Without even realizing it, this process causes him to learn about human nature. He puts himself in women's shoes and learns not only what women want, but also what women need.

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