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It must be nice to be able to treat yourself to a multi-multi-million dollar vanity greeting card. In Madonna's first movie since the larger-than-life Evita, everybody variously goes on and on about her character's "fantastic body," says "you're great; you're smart, you're beautiful, you're a great lay, and you're a good cook," and her leading man (Rupert Everett) even swoons "you're the only woman I ever wanted to -- be." But you can't help noticing no one tells her, "Gee, you're even a better actress than that woman who always forgets the lemon in my ice water at Appleby's."
She plays Abby, an L.A. yoga instructor (in an early draft of the script she was a swim instructor, but decided she didn't want to have to deal with pool hair) who, coming off a bad relationship, indulges in a one-time drunken consolation with her gay bestest friend Robert (Everett) and gets pregnant (you know it's momentous because it's the Fourth of July and the red rockets are glaring as they do it; there was a similar scene in What Planet Are You From?, where Shandling and Bening -- doesn't that sound like something you'd have done when restoring a '66 Impala? "Yeah, we took it in for a complete shandling and bening" -- roll around in a Vegas hotel while electronically coordinated fountains cavort outside their window; the latter effect is much more entertaining). But they're longtime true buds, so they move in together to have the baby. Jump to his sixth birthday, when things are still going great until Abby meets Ben (Benjamin Bratt from "Law & Order"), who wants to marry her and move to New York, breaking up the old family for the sake of the new. Unexpected cross-gender jealousies develop into a tense quadrangle, and trouble follows.
Everett, who played gay pal to superstar actress in another, much better film (My Best Friend's Wedding), tries to carry the dramatic load, but even he has trouble with such dialogue as "I know we crossed the line -- run off the main road. But there's no reason we can't climb up the embankment and get back on track." I had to look around at the other people seated nearby to determine if I'd actually heard correctly. Director John Schlesinger, who won an Oscar 30 years ago for Midnight Cowboy and therefore has no excuse, gets Everett to reveal his deepest feelings by rolling his eyes a lot, relegating Madonna to showing off her chiseled delts and sculpted cleavage. In fact, when you toss in Bratt's pectorals, The Next Best Thing looks less like a movie and more like some genetic-engineering student's senior project, although one from a two-bit college in the Caribbean, seeing how she's still got that gap in her teeth, and Bratt displays some great big symmetrically-spaced welts on his chest that are either birthmarks or scars from some wild lovemaking involving a hot waffle iron in a scene that was cut to keep the PG-13 rating.
I really wanted to like this; I've always enjoyed Rupert Everett's movies, and have in the last couple years even started to like Madonna. But the only good thing I can say about it is, at least in the story everybody wants what's best for the kid. And there's a food bit part for Illeana Douglas. In retrospect it's safe to say Madonna probably should have done a sequel to her last movie instead: Evita Goes to Hell: Don't Cry for Me, Gehenna. D+
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