What Women Want

The engine of Nancy Meyers’s film is not romance but idea theft. Once Nick can hear women thinking, the first thing he does is overhear the Nike campaign belonging to Darcy, promoted over him, and present it as his own. The resolution is tied to confessing it: after Darcy is fired, Nick talks the boss into rehiring her and says the campaign was hers, so the close plays less as a love scene than a return of stolen property. The gift opens and shuts on two accidents, a hairdryer dropped into a bathtub and then a storm. Everything owed in between is settled with Darcy alone. The project has a long writing history: Meyers rewrote a Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa script called Head Games and the title changed; the story credit on screen is shared between Goldsmith, Yuspa and Diane Drake. It is set in Chicago and filmed there on location, with interiors built in Los Angeles, and earned 374.1 million dollars worldwide on a 70 million dollar budget. A good fit if you like that the first use of a fantastical gift is stealing an ad pitch, treated as office intrigue rather than moral crisis. Not for anyone waiting for Nick to answer to the dozens of women he listened to without consent; only Darcy gets an apology.