Second Best

What is it with false advertising in movie theaters these days? Whatever you might think from the trailer, The Next Best Thing is not another Object of My Affection-it's much more serious, and much better.

That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of saccharine moments in The Next Best Thing. The plot centers around forty-somethings Robert (Rupert Everett) and Abbie (Madonna), a gay man and a straight woman who end up in bed (or rather, on the floor) with each other after a night of drunken carousing. Their night is wonderfully set up with what must be the most varied collection of drink shots since Cocktail-mixed drinks, straight drinks, drinks in fuzzy lighting, drinks down the hatch, drinks in hands, drinks on tables and sideboards.

Everett does a great job at acting the fussy, sensitive gay man-in contrast to his friends, who are mostly into the drug and party scene. Each character is distinct enough that the depiction is not stereotypical or offensive. Neil Patrick Harris, aka Doogie Howser, is especially convincing and touching as a bereft and then befuddled homosexual, despite the fact that he delivers some of the movies' more obnoxious lines.

From the first half of the film, which sets up the plot and culminates in the conception of the baby, the movie jumps five or six years into the future. Now, Robert and Abbie are living happily with their son Sam (Malcolm Stumpf). Abbie is still a yoga teacher, Robert a landscape gardener, and the two have settled into a routine of taking care of Sam. Robert is still sexually active, though he is carefully portrayed as putting his son's interests above his own, while Abbie has not had a date in ages.

Things start going awry-for the characters, and for the movie-when Abbie meets Ben (Benjamin Bratt). Madonna has never been a stellar actress, but she gets along fine through the first half of the movie-even though it's a bit unconvincing that a woman in a position where she meets that many people, and with her looks, would never get a date. Unfortunately, her romance with Ben and the ensuing complications are rather unconvincing.

It's tough to write about the rest of the movie without giving the end away. Suffice it to say that the new relationship triangle between Robert, Abbie and Ben is anything but calm, people die of AIDS and there's a protracted custody battle-hardly Object of My Affection material. In this part, Rupert Everett gets to shine as the troubled and legally defenseless father who does his best to pit moral authority against the letter of the law. His body language and facial expressions, honed in pathetic pictures such as My Best Friend's Wedding, finally get put to serious use.

The end of The Next Best Thing is its worst part. Instead of leading us to a resolution of the conflicts raised in the second half, director John Schlesinger (who has been in the business a while, producing classics like Midnight Cowboy and Marathon Man) just ends the movie-almost as if he'd used up his time allowance-with text information on what happens to the characters. How disappointing!

So while The Next Best Thing starts out pretty strong-interesting plot, good acting-it stumbles in the second half and falls at the very end. Maybe the producers weren't courageous enough to want to cast Madonna in a comedy, maybe they thought the audience couldn't handle serious issues-in any case, this movie is certainly not the best thing out there.