The flop Richard Gere believes should have been a huge hit: “I can’t do any better”
Hollywood has been good to Richard Gere, especially considering he never seemed to court fame and fortune from the film industry. Theatre was his first love, and he spent nearly a decade doing nothing but stage work until he earned his first major on-screen role in Richard Brooks’s 1977 drama Looking for Mr Goodbar.
The 1970s and early ‘80s were his breakout years, with Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo, and Taylor Hackford’s An Officer and a Gentleman turning the young actor into Hollywood’s leading man of the moment. Despite gravitating towards under-the-radar movies from directors who weren’t part of the mainstream, fame followed Gere around wherever he went, especially when he agreed, reluctantly, to star opposite Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman.
Gere wasn’t particularly impressed by the script of the film and found the character of a wealthy businessman who hires a sex worker for a week to be underdeveloped and downright problematic, but when he met Roberts in person, he knew he had to be part of the project. Her charisma was undeniable, and it turned the film into one of the most beloved romantic comedies of the decade.
Although he took a step back from glitzy movies starting in the early 2000s, Gere kept working steadily. Some of the films he’s made since then have been high-profile successes, including the adaptation of the musical Chicago and Adrian Lyne’s erotic thriller Unfaithful. But even some of the movies that seemed like sure-fire hits, at least as far as critics were concerned, flew under the radar, much to his dismay.
The most perplexing one was Robert Altman’s Dr T and the Women, a romantic comedy from 2000 that featured an all-star cast. Gere plays a wealthy gynaecologist who haplessly navigates his relationships with a host of complicated and very different women played by, among others, Helen Hunt, Farrah Fawcett, Laura Dern, Kate Hudson, and Liv Tyler. It failed to make back its $23million budget, and critics gave it tepid reviews, accusing it of being far too shallow and light for the director behind such barnstorming classics as Nashville and McCabe and Mrs Miller.
According to Gere, however, he and Altman were baffled by this response. “Bob and I could never figure out why that [film] wasn’t embraced more,” he said in an interview on the Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast in 2024. “Bob said, ‘I can’t do any better than that. What do they want from me?’”
Dr T and the Women certainly isn’t either man’s best film, but they had both set the bar pretty high for themselves earlier in their careers, and the movie shouldn’t be judged too harshly because of it. Ultimately, it’s an unusual romantic comedy with several fantastic performances from its female cast and a benign but engaging one from Gere. It didn’t have the snap to become a box office success, especially as the genre was eking out its last shreds of energy before dying almost completely in the 2010s, but it doesn’t deserve to be forgotten altogether.
