You'd be hard-pressed to find a modern-day couple as impossibly glamorous as Rupert Everett and Madonna; their casting as common folk in the gay-parenting drama The Next Best Thing is just one of the film's myriad problems. (One thing we never needed to see was these two pushing grocery carts in a supermarket. It's just unnatural.) Best friends in sun-dappled L.A. (he's a landscaper, she's a yoga instructor), Abbie (Madonna) and Robert (Everett) fall into an amorous embrace on a fateful Fourth of July after a few too many martinis. Robert's gay, which complicates things; even more complicating is Abbie's confession a few weeks later that she's with child. Six years later, Robert, Abbie, and their son Sam are all living together peacefully and happily--that is, until a hunky investment banker (Benjamin Bratt) starts making eyes at Abbie, throwing their carefully constructed dynamic into disarray.
Lazily directed by Oscar-winner John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) with an eye towards his actors' muscle tone rather than characterizations (even the kid does yoga), the faults in The Next Best Thing aren't solely on the shoulders of its miscast stars, but rather the painfully inept screenplay by Tom Ropelewski. With cardboard dialogue that sounds like bad first-draft material--including wailing by Madonna about how she can't find a man (ha!) and a gym-buffed Everett complaining about gay male body image (double ha!)--the movie stumbles from domestic comedy to custody-suit tragedy when it takes a bizarre left turn in the third act. Any statements about new definitions of family are buried underneath these dubious events, which (of course) provide teary courtroom outbursts for both leads. Everett has a quick way with a one-liner, and Madonna is more relaxed than she's ever been in a film, but Schlesinger just tosses them in front of the camera with no help whatsoever; the supporting cast, including Lynn Redgrave, Neil Patrick Harris, and Illeana Douglas, is also left to flounder inexplicably. There's a thoughtful and provocative movie to be made about gay parents, but The Next Best Thing certainly isn't it. --Mark Englehart

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=htt...6lr%3D%26sa%3DG



Madonna’s performance
next to nothing




The Next Best Thing

Rating:
(PG-13; mature thematic elements, sexual content, partial nudity, language)
Cast:
Madonna, Michael Vartan, Rupert Everett, Josef Sommer, Benjamin Bratt.
Director:
Directed by John Schlesinger.
Time:
107 minutes.
Playing at:
National Amusements, Danbarry Middletown.

BY MARGARET A. McGURK
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Believe me, I understand the irony in labeling Madonna, the very paradigm of self-invention, a bad actress.

Still, there is no getting around the fact that her performance in The Next Best Thing is awkward, ill-timed and jarringly mannered — right down to the weird, vaguely British intonation she uses instead of her native Michigan accent.

Not for a single moment did she seem at ease in the role of Abbie, a muscular yoga instructor who is devastated when Kevin (Michael Vartan) walks out on her, proclaiming he wants a woman who will just shut up and have sex with him.

For comfort she turns to her gay buddy Robert (Rupert Everett), a sweat-stained landscaper who is almost as buffed up as Abbie. One martini-soaked night, they have sex, she gets pregnant and they decide to raise the child together. Everything is cozy, as long as he’s dating, she’s not and their little boy doesn’t ask too many questions.

When Abbie meets and falls for hunky businessman Ben (Benjamin Bratt), who holds his own in the movie’s pumped-up pectoral competition, the story shifts into courtroom-drama gear as Robert and Abbie fight for custody of young Sam (Malcolm Stumpf). From then on, what had been merely silly declines rapidly into pure canned corn.

Even Mr. Everett, an actor of considerable charm and skill, is soon strangling in the hokey, soap-opera yarn spun by writer Thomas Ropelewski. His script is so intent on preaching the worth of unconventional families that it sacrifices logic, factual credibility, common sense and narrative integrity.

Director John Schlesinger seems at a loss as to how to rescue this sodden material. His idea of character development, for instance, seems to consist of changing the color of the filters he uses throughout to soften Madonna’s flinty looks.