Product: The Next Best Thing (2000)
Rating: 3.0
Hard to Empathize with the Characters (Region 2 DVD)
With all the star power behind this movie, it should have been executed skillfully; pulling the viewer into the lives of nice people, exploring the novel living arrangements and lifestyles of the main characters, even highlighting what should have been a key, dramatic moment in the movie. Instead, the movie drags on for nearly an hour before we have an inkling of what this movie is really about. As it drags itself forcefully along we have great difficulty identifying with the characters or their plight.Abbie Reynolds (Madonna) is a woman who hears her biological clock ticking. She wants to meet a nice guy and have one or more children. Failing meeting Mr. Right, she would at least like to have a child. After breaking up with yet another boyfriend, Madonna commiserates with a homosexual friend, Robert Whittaker (Ruppert Everett), and the two end up (good heavens!) doing something sexual together. Soon after, Madonna reveals she is pregnant. Robert decides he wants to be fully involved as Sam's (Malcolm Stumpf) father.Well, time flies and Ben Cooper, excellently played by Benjamin Bratt, enters the picture, quickly falling in love with Abbie. Ben behaves just as we would like or hope he would, and adjusts his life to suit Abbie, Robert and Sam's as much, if not more, than is reasonable. Unfortunately for poor Sam, the relatively immature conflict between Abbie and Sam washes aside all Ben's good deeds and flexibility and a nasty court battle ensues. I'll not give away the ending or any other details in the event you wish to try the movie yourself.In addition to the star horsepower already mentioned, Lynn Redgrave, Neil Patrick Harris, and Joseph Sommer, all with extensive acting credentials, appear. The director and producer add even more horsepower. The problem is that all this horsepower failed to help me understand the plot, or empathize with the characters. This movie presented a wonderful opportunity to help explore having a homosexual as a parent, and deal more in depth with the issues of homosexuality and stereotypes surrounding homosexuality. Instead, the movie usually pays only brief lip service to those issues. In some cases the movie opens the door to the issue, and then sweeps it under the rug. In one example, Sam asks Robert about a inappropriate word he heard associated with homosexuals, and what the word meant. Instead of dealing with the issue, the answer was more akin to "babies come from the cabbage patch." If the movie did not want to deal with sensitive issues, it should not have brought them up in the first place.After forcing myself to watch this movie for an hour or more in the hope that it would really take off and make a statement, it devolved into legal bickering between Abbie and Robert with all sorts of uninteresting confusion thrown in by Ben and an old boyfriend of Abbie's. Instead of a grand statement regarding homosexuals as parents, the movie became just another couple bickering over child custody and I became extremely disappointed with the plot development.Even in the final moments of the movie, the opportunity to do more than have a trite and cliche ending was passed by. There is little more I can say about the ending.The movie is not a total loss. Benjamin Bratt and Malcolm Stumpf have good chemistry during their interactions with others in the movie. Had Benjamin and Malcolm been absent, this movie would have been a total loss. As it is, I rate this movie three stars largely on the performance of these two actors and what they brought to the movie.