Product: The Next Best Thing (2000)
Rating: 1.0
Retro, timid, limp. You're so tired, girlfriend!
The Next Best Thing's advertising put great emphasis on the comedy aspects. While it does have some amusing scenes [none of them hilariously funny], the entire second half is melodrama on the order of a TV soap opera, only not nearly as clever.Madonna plays Abbie, a hip Los Angeles woman of about forty who says she never married because she never found the right guy. When her live-in boyfriend walks out on her, she runs to her best friend, Robert [Rupert Everett], a handsome gay man who has decided that he may never have another serious relationship. He tells her she is better off without the guy, which is true, yet she pines, not so much for the old flame, as for the fact that she may never have a family of her own. Robert lives in the guest house of a swank Hollywood Hills home belonging to two old queens, who would have had the movies best lines if it had had any. Left alone at the house one 4th of July, Robert and Abbie drown their sorrows in margaritas and wind up in bed together. A few weeks later, Abbie announces she is pregnant with Robert's child. Robert decides that he will move in with her and be a real Dad to the child, although he thinks marriage would be hypocritical. After all, satisfying each other has certain limits. All this works out for six years, until Abbie meets Ben [Benjamin Bratt], and they fall in love.This is a perfect plot for a satirical comedy about love, lust, puritanical inhibitions and other such nonsense. Instead, the movie does an about face and becomes serious. The characters get mad, angry and downright ugly. Then, as if the producers saw the damage they'd done, there is a trite 'feel good' ending, which looks tacked on.Madonna and Everett do the best they can with the material. I can't really gauge Madonna's acting ability. She was superb in Evita and a few other movies, but I suspect that she hasn't the discipline to throw her full talents into anything she doesn't believe in one hundred percent. I know Everett is a fine actor, but here there is little he can do except reprise his character from My Best Friend's Wedding. In real life, the two stars are good friends, and I can only imagine all the knowing glances exchanged between them during production.It is frankly a bit shocking that John Schlesinger directed the film. Thirty years ago he directed two movies, Midnight Cowboy and Sunday, Bloody Sunday, which expertly examined the nuances and subtleties of human sexuality. He's at a total loss here. I suspect most of the audience will be, too.