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The Next Best Thing
Director: John Schlesinger Starring: Madonna, Rupert Everett
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What's more trendy in Holly- wood movies than nice, pretty gay boys who have great relationships with straight female friends? Ever since Julia Roberts and Rupert Everett showed the world in My Best Friend's Wedding that gay-straight platonic friends were more fun than heterosexual romance, Tinseltown has been casting about for like-minded scenarios of witty, funny, and heart-warming gay-boy-straight-girl relationships. Alas, the first entree in this sweepstakes is The Next Best Thing, which as promising as it looked in theory, is a sorry mess.

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And it did look good in the pre-release publicity. Directed by John Schlesinger-- Midnight Cowboy, Sunday Bloody Sunday-- it is the story of Los Angelinos Abbie (Madonna) and Robert (Rupert Everett) who are best friends entering their 40s, both longing for a more permanent, well, life situation. She is a yoga teacher, he is a gardener and (presumably) landscape architect. This is how we know that she is straight and he is flowery. She breaks up with a boyfriend, he hasn't had one in a while, a friend dies of AIDS and one New Year's Eve they get drunk and end up having sex. As is the way with so much unplanned heterosexual activity, she gets preggers and they decide to bring the child-- Sam-- up together. This works well until, seven years later, she falls in love with Ben (Benjamin Bratt) a wealthy mergers-and-acquisition man. Ben is nice and lives in New York and Abbie decides that Ben should now be Sam's daddy and they should all move across the country. Robert gets upset. Abbie spirits Sam out of the house. Robert sues for joint custody but has no real legal standing. Abbie discloses that Sam is not his child anyway but that of the ex-boyfriend. Robert tries to get ex-boyfriend to sue for joint custody to keep Sam in LA. Abbie freaks out. Finally Abbie sees the light and decides that Ben will live in LA and they will all raise Sam together. And they say Hate is Not a Family Value.

This is not a bad idea for a movie. It reflects, as much as anything set in LA can, the more honest and confusing realities of people, parents, and families today. So what makes The Next Best Thing the last thing you want to see?

To begin with, Tom Ropelewski's script is simple-minded and often simply unbelievable. He has populated the film with minor characters who are caricatures of types-- the fussy old queens, the man with AIDS, the heroine's girlfriends-- that are so patently false, so blatantly wrong, that the broader context of the film is an unrecognizable cartoon of real life. Even the more substantial characters, such as Robert's kookie loving mother, Helen (Lynn Redgrave), and homophobic-but-finally-accepting father, Richard (Josef Sommer), are, even in the hands of these fine actors, parodies of stock characters. The only person who rises above this is Illeana Douglas's portrayal as Robert's lawyer Elizabeth, who brings life, intelligence, and energy to an empty role.

As for Rupert Everett and Madonna-- well, they are playing updated copies of themselves in their various previous roles. Everett's understanding, morally strong, and charming gay man is a rehash of his role and work in My Best Friend's Wedding. In only two movies he has managed to invent a new "gay type" in film and then reduce it to a stereotype in less than two year's time. Here his acting feels rote-- maybe because the character of Robert has so little life-- and the nuance and shading we have seen in his performances is simply absent. Madonna has proven herself a fine actor over the years, but like Everett, she self-implodes here by playing Madonna playing a character in a movie. Scene after scene-- her first date with Kevin, teaching yoga, sitting in the court room-- is shot as though it was a quick moment from a Madonna video.

But the biggest flaw of the film is that it cannot decide what it wants to be. On one hand, it is a fairly harsh depiction of homophobia-- all the worse because it is being acted out by a close friend in a complicated relationship. On the other hand, the film aspires at many moments to be a sort of light comedy. It is almost as though writer Ropelewski and director Schlesinger were afraid of losing their mainstream audience-- Madonna fans in particular-- by making the film too heavy or political. By the time we get to the courtroom scenes, Ropelewski's creaky writing and plotting begins to sag under the weight of old Hollywood melodrama-- teary-eyed Rupert Everett in the witness box conjures up nothing more (or less) than Lana Turner in Madam X.

This timidity in making a clear artistic statement is even evident in the advertising for the film. In most ads, the tag line reads: "He was smart, handsome, and single. When her biological clock was running out, he was... the next best thing." Well, the point of the film-- driven home in the beginning and at the end-- is that Robert is actually the best thing she could have. The title is ironic, but to make a film in which a gay-straight parenting relationship can be understood to be more vital, important, or logical than a heterosexual marriage would not play the malls. In the end, The Next Best Thing is the worst possible type of queer movie-- it is trendy without being insightful, "political" without actually being very political, and worse of all, it is dull when it should be gay.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com