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Mel Gibson
really hear the voices of women? Well, obviously. Merely think back a year
ago, when he went on a promotional tour forhis movie Payback, and visited Toronto's City TV/ MovieTelevision. He heard the voices of hundreds of women that day, assembled on Hogtown's Queen Street West, faces pressed against the glass for a glimpse of one of Hollywood's legendary hunks. But in his new comedy What Women Want, he plays a man literally privy to the inner voices of women - the needs, the fears, the insecurities, in short the signals that we, as men, are presumably too thickheaded to ever appreciate. Having met Mel Gibson - indeed having watched an NFL game on the tube with him - I can tell you he is a 44-year-old man as caught up in the ridiculous rituals as maleness as the rest of us. His taste runs to cruel practical jokes (witness the frozen rat in a shoe box he proffered as a practical joke to Julia Roberts, his co-star in Conspiracy Theory). As for that NFL game, Mel's not particularly a football fan (born in the U.S., he lived in Australia during those crucial sports-imprinting years). But he cheered perversely against the team his (male) publicist had bet money on. Guys are like that with each other. 
But back to what women want - the subject of this profile, after all - he
clearly has a clue or two in that regard. Assuming women want someone who
will stand by them and raise a family with them, then Mel Gibson's cred is
that he has been with his wife, Robyn, for 20 years. They have seven
children (the most recent of which was born the week after the premiere of
Payback)."The truth is I don't really know what women want," he jovially told Entertainment Tonight. "I've spent the better part of 20 years trying to figure out what one particular woman wants." For what it's worth, What Women Want is only the second time in Mel Gibson's career that he's been directed by a woman - in this case Nancy Meyers (The Parent Trap), who is only directing a movie for the first time herself. The first was Gillian Armstrong, who directed a very young Mel in Mrs. Soffel way back in 1984. "They were both good experiences, I might add," says Gibson, a man who known for testing his directors' mettle (just ask Brian Helgeland, the director of Payback, who quit over the battle of wills). "The actresses, director and a good part of the crew are all women," says Gibson. "I gotta say, it's a lotta fun. They become frank pretty fast. You get to know them on a real level." 
In What Women Want, Gibson plays Nick Marshall, a hotshot
advertising executive whose entire view of the female half of the species
is informed by a childhood spent with a Vegas showgirl mother and hanging
around within influence distance of The Rat Pack."He's fairly confident, he's fairly cool. He wants to be Frank and Dean and Sammy," Gibson says. "He has the perspective of having been raised among women but knows surprisingly little about them. He just thinks he does." Unfortunately, Nick's old school sexism is playing less and less well as his agency starts to shoot for the women's demographic. And he's on extremely thin ice when an overachieving female ad exec named Darcy (Helen Hunt) starts to steal his thunder. His boss (Alan Alda) lays it on the line: find out what women want or consider another line of work. Which is where deus ex machina enters the equation in the form of an electrical accident at his  apartment
that suddenly leaves him capable of hearing women's thoughts out loud -
from the lascivious door-person who works his building, to his sexually
precocious daughter to his competitor, Darcy, whose softer side only comes
out in her audible subconscious.Eventually, indeed inevitably, he falls in love with his hated corporate enemy. What at first seems like a curse, is the opportunity of his life - or so says his psychiatrist (Bette Midler in a scene-stealing cameo). "(Comedy) is more difficult than action," action-man Mel told the London Sunday Times of his learning curve on What Women Want. "You can't get away with as much, and you have to be more truthful. If you get laughs, it's because people identify with some kind of truth." Like most of his films these days, What Women Want is produced by Gibson's own Icon Productions - a company that pumps out enough action films to meet the demand of fans of one of the great action stars of our time. A Harris poll of movie fans recently placed him third all-time after John Wayne and Harrison Ford. When we asked his thoughts about finishing behind a dead man, Mel quipped "Better him than me." At the same time, Icon - a company flush with cash from its founder's $20 million paydays and profit participation - has financed flicks by the likes of Atom Egoyan (Felicia's Journey) and Wim Wenders (The Million Dollar Hotel). As the time arrives for Gibson to try his hand as a flawed comic hero, he might as well do it on his own corporate terms. Offscreen, Gibson tries to maintain some thing like a normal life - or as normal as it can be with seven children, six of them boys. This testosterone imbalance is yet another handicap when it comes to assessing the female psyche. Yes, he says, |
| women do seem obsessed with what men are
thinking. "(But) if you could hear a man's thoughts it would just be the sound of crickets and a lot of knuckle-dragging," he says. As for women, he told E! Online, "Figure it this way: Freud spent almost his entire working career trying to figure the same thing out, and he died without the answer. Not that I put much stock in Freud, but at least he was trying to find the answer. And he didn't come any closer than the rest of us. He thought he did, but really he was just chasing his tail. "I've had certain epiphanies that hit me between the eyes and I went, Whoa! So that's what  women want! They might come five years apart,
and during that gap you're in hell. But all of a sudden, you're like, Hey,
this flowers thing works. Why didn't I think of that before?"But mostly I think it (the answer) lies somewhere between chocolate and conversation." - Jim Slotek |
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