The Next Best Thing

Rating

Director

John Schlesinger

Screenplay

Thomas Ropelewski

Length

1h 48m

Starring

Madonna, Rupert Everett, Benjamin Bratt, Illeana Douglas, Michael Vartan, Josef Sommer, Malcolm Stumpf, Lynn Redgrave, Neil Patrick Harris, Mark Valley, Suzanne Kurll, Stacy Edwards

MPAA Rating

PG-13

Review

PREFACE:
In the early 2000s, I was writing reviews for an outfit called Apollo Guide Reviews. That website has since been closed down.

Attempting to reconstruct those reviews has been an exercise in frustration. Having sent them to Apollo Guide via email on a server I no longer have access to (and which probably doesn’t have records going back that far), my only option was to dig through The Wayback Machine to see if I could find them there. Unfortunately, while I found a number of reviews, a handful of them have disappeared into the ether. At this point, almost two decades later, it is rather unlikely that I will find them again.

Luckily, I was able to locate my original review of this particular film. Please note that I was not doing my own editing at the time, Apollo Guide was. As such, there may be more than your standard number of grammatical and spelling errors in this review. In an attempt to preserve what my style had been like back then, I am not re-editing these reviews, which are presented as-is.

REVIEW:
The American obsession with straight women and gay men was one of the few original storylines to emerge in the 1990s, but with each new film, the concept becomes weaker and less ‘new.’ The Next Best Thing stars pop singer Madonna and gay heartthrob Rupert Everett in this latest swim in the muddied waters of new age relationships.

Madonna stars as Abbie, a young Yoga instructor whose best friend happens to be gay. Rupert Everett is her gay friend Robert who works as a gardener for a rich gay couple. Early in the film, we meet each character’s personal advisor, and both are absurd and contribute little to the movie’s central storyline. Abbie?s friend is Elizabeth Ryder played by character actress Illeana Douglas. Neil Patrick Harris (of television’s Doogie Howser MD) plays David, Robert’s gay confidant who loses his lover in one of the movie’s pointless sidelines.

The first sign of trouble is when Abbie and Robert get drunk and have sex one evening while house-sitting. Abbie discovers she’s pregnant a few weeks later and the two agree to raise their child as mother and father despite their differing sexual orientations.

Everything goes well until the little one is old enough to ask questions –things like why Daddy doesn’t sleep in the same room as Mommy, and a brief discussion of what ‘faggot’ means. From there, anything that could go wrong does and by the end of the film, every character has been successfully broken.

With Madonna’s weak record as an actress, The Next Best Thing is a step up. She’s definitely no Evita here, but after a rough first hour of the film, she shines in her depressive states. Everett is quite the opposite; he begins quite well, but falters in the movie’s last hour, although his performance is never bad. The rest of the cast is admirably strong even if their characters are unnecessary.

Director John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) hasn’t had a hit since the mid-’80s and this isn’t one either. You can see his strength with visuals in many flowing shots, but most are unnecessary in such a simple piece. He tries various camera angels that seem wholly inappropriate and failed to cut several useless scenes.

That being said, The Next Best Thing is an enjoyable film with a strong message, but its execution is weak and many of the plot elements are antiquated and pointless. They say that children are taught to hate — an idea that this film considers briefly and comments on astutely. Kids don’t hate. They see everything from an innocent point of view as bystanders in a world where peer-pressure runs rampant.

This film can be watched on several different levels, but if we don’t see the homosexual perspective on parenting and the ability of gay men or women to effectively raise children, then we haven’t found its true meaning.

Review Written

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