The good doctor has a wife and two daughters. One of his daughters is a JFK conspiracy geek, and the other is about to be married. When she invites an old friend to be her head bridesmaid, her sister becomes strangely jealous, and the plot thickens.
Dr. T's wife is nicely played by Farrah Fawcett as a woman on the verge of losing the plot, who, soon after appearing on screen, actually cracks and takes her clothes off in a shopping mall. She is arrested, and the diagnosis is that she is unable to cope with her happy life in which she has been given everything she ever wanted, so she has regressed into a childlike state. I found this a bit hard to swallow, and I'm told it didn't go down too well with the feminists, but I can see the point. Dr. T is simply too kind and has given her too much — and when you have everything there's nothing left to work towards. I personally think that Mrs. T didn't really go nuts, she simply snapped out of the reverie that all her friends seem stuck in; the endless shopping, gossiping, dressing up, drinking champagne and other such nonsense as would drive any sane person mad given enough time.
On top of his family's problems, the constant onslaught of women bickering in the waiting room, coupled with the behaviour of his clingy head nurse starts to wear Dr. T down. He is clearly a man who is so used to taking care of other people that he's forgotten how to take care of himself. When he meets a new woman, Bree, at the golf club he's fascinated. Here's a strong, somewhat aggressive woman who doesn't need a man to take care of her, yet Dr. T falls into his familiar groove and is soon confused by the fact that she doesn't seem to need him like other women do. By the end of the film, the poor doctor has begun to lose his mind. When the wedding is ruined by a not-really-unexpected surprise, Dr. T takes off in the wedding car and drives straight into a very well executed movie-thunderstorm. What happens next is totally weird and wonderful, and I will not disclose it here.
The one gripe I have about this film is typical of Robert Altman's style, and that is he keeps two or three scenes going at the same time and cuts between them. Just when I'm getting interested in a scene, it flips to something else that's happening simultaneously. I found that this made Short Cuts a difficult film to watch, and Dr. T suffers somewhat from the same problem, although not quite as badly.
Apart from that, it is a superbly crafted film and well worth seeing.