# Next Best Thing, The (2000)

### reviewed by
Harvey S. Karten

    THE NEXT BEST THING

Reviewed by Harvey Karten Paramount Pictures/Lakeshore Entertainment Director: John Schlesinger Writer: Tom Ropelewski Cast: Madonna, Rupert Everett, Benjamin Bratt, Kimberley Davies, Illeana Douglas, Stacy Edwards, Neil Patrick Harris, Lynn Redgrave

When you come down to it, "The Next Best Thing" looks at first like a glorified, big-screen soap. Custody battles are the warp and woof of daytime TV dramas. But there's a dollop of originality to John Schlesinger's take on the issue and Tom Ropelewski's screenplay avoids most of the cliches and predictable dialogue that you might find on Channel 7 on a rainy weekday at tea time. What "The Next Best Thing" really has going for it that you won't find anywhere on the tube is some darn credible and compelling acting, featuring genuine chemistry between Madonna, one of the most talked- about figures in Hollywood, and Rupert Everett, who is in real life an out-of-closet homosexual and one who cannot do wrong in any movie that casts him.

Productions with gay themes that are essentially divided into two halves--the first comic, the second tragic--are not new. They've been around at least since Mart Crowley penned the wonderful play "The Boys in the Band"--in which a man's roommate confesses his love not to the man he was expected to, but rather to the roommate's wife. While the power of that play is the way it peels away its characters' pretensions, the energy of "The Next Best Thing" is evoked by the great love its principal gay character has for the child he believes he has fathered.

A pivotal aspect of the movie is that while the opening half hour is filled with ordinary, feather-light comedy, pratfalls and the like, one is pleasantly surprised when the buffoonery turns serious and the performers (particularly Everett) are given their heads to evoke audience empathy. Abbie (Madonna) opens the tale as she is being dumped by her boyfriend, Kevin (Michael Vartan) who--considering her warm personality and shapely form makes Kevin a harebrained gentleman indeed. Luckily for Abbey she has an understanding gay pal, Robert (Rupert Everett), a terrific shoulder to lean on. When Robert--who is housesitting for a rich, aging gay couple--enjoys some drinks with Abbie and they go into a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers act in the spacious living room of the house, they somehow end up together in bed. Nine months following, a baby arrives. The unconventional couple live together for five years, with Robert's connection to young Sam (Malcolm Stumpf) a loving one indeed, until complications arrive. Abbie begins dating a rich and handsome investment banker, Ben (Benjamin Bratt), and as Ben and Abbie's thoughts turn to the prospect of marriage and a permanent move 3,000 miles from the home shared by Abbie, Robert, and Sam, the earnest drama kicks in and continues relentlessly until the final resolution of the story.

Compelling though the second half is, director Schlesinger errs on the side of soap opera conventions by melodramatically turning Abbie's fiance and Abbie herself into villains who, about to frustrate Robert's natural desire to see Sam with some regularity force the poor man to take a desperate legal action against them. Nor can Schlesinger resist a final, melodramatic flourish during the custody hearing involving a knight in shining armor bursting breathlessly on the scene.

Though some of the initial, comic half is of the cookie- cutter type--gay friends fooling about during the funeral of one of their own and ridiculing the pomp and circumstance of the proceedings--one comedic scene is a winner, involving Robert's entry to Kevin's recording studio in full gay attire allowing the rap group in attendance to assume that Kevin was Robert's gay boy friend. In short, a story which (absent the unusual nature of Robert and Abbie's household) is conventional but is redeemed by some of the finest acting this year so far--matching even the performances of Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire in "The Wonder Boys."

Rated PG-13. Running Time: 107 minutes. (C) 2000 Harvey Karten, film_critic@compuserve.com

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews