What Women Want

The title caught my eye :)

While the movie started off like a romantic comedy, and seemed kind of loosely scripted, it's salvation I guess comes from this one question it aspires to take on. 'A man listening to what a woman wants'.  One of those seemingly impossibles (well, mostly )

     

                                     

Nick Marshall (Mel Gibson) is a chauvinistic advertisement executive, who is working on a campaign oriented at women buyers. He's struggling to get his head around it, and is hit by this bolt of electricity. And when he comes to, he finds that he now has the ability to 'hear' what women are thinking. 

It causes a total upheaval in his head. One, his chauvinism is in for a threat, as he finds that all those women who he thought doted on him, well, had other views too. In fact he's so disturbed he goes sees a therapist. 

And then there's his ambitious streak which surfaces and he undermines his colleague and competition Darcy (Helen Hunt) by stealing her ideas as they occur to her.

Then slowly he starts to tune in, and realizes he is so infinitely rich by virtue of being able to listen in to her vulnerabilities and needs, and to actually understand her. It brings out another side of him, the caring and sensitive lover, the father to who the teenage daughter will connect, the boss who understands his employees, and it all ends fairy tale like.

The movie focuses on this question raised by Freud......can a man ever know what a woman really wants.

I'm thinking....does this sound a little presumptuous? Does it presuppose that what men want is clear and out in the open?

I'd allow myself to wonder if men are one step further away. Will their egos even allow them to know what they themselves want? Apologies for the tongue in cheek generalization....but since we're in gender space :)