Madonna
By the time Madonna was making Evita, she had been dating Carlos Leon, her physical trainer, for years. She got pregnant while making Evita, and her daughter, Lourdes, was born before Evita was released.

It comes naturally that the next phase of Madonna would be as mother. If you’ve been keeping up, the phases have been: girl, sex object, mother, and wife. A few months after wrapping up principal photography on The Next Best Thing, Madonna got pregnant again, this time with then-future husband Guy Ritchie.

Madonna’s new image as mother was also accompanied by a devotion to mysticism and religious orders. She would become involved with Kabbalah and Hindu rituals and imagery. The singles from her Ray of Light album were filled with either motherhood imagery or religious imagery. In Ray of Light, Madonna is seen bouncing around in front of time-lapsed imagery, which frequently includes babies and children, while Drowned World told the story of a woman giving up her fame in order to be with her daughter. Meanwhile, she featured religious imagery in Frozen by breaking up into blackbirds and The Power of Good-bye by drowning to get reborn. Despite them collectively sharing themes with The Next Best Thing, none of them felt perfect on their own. Besides, Ray of Light was released in 1998, 2 years before The Next Best Thing.

So, instead, I’m going to cheat a little and put the video for American Pie, Madonna’s cover version of the Don MacLean magnum opus. Everything about this movie was a catastrophic miscalculation, and so it has to be teamed up with a song and video that are, themselves, massive miscalculations.

If there’s one overriding theme of American Pie, it’s hubris. Madonna and William Orbit took the 7:40 original version, chopped out the middle half, kept in what was convenient, removed the rock and added in some bubble-gum pop background that was a trial sound for the Music album. In the video, Madonna is trying to capture the “we’re all equal” vibe of America, but dances in front of it and also makes out with Rupert Everett.

The message of American Pie, or at least Madonna’s video, is that music makes everybody in America happy, so Madonna is going to provide you with music to make you happy. Are you sure you don’t like Madonna’s music? Don’t you fit into one of these categories? Perhaps you’re an old couple. Or, maybe a gay couple? Lesbians? Goths? Everybody is equal, and they’ve all come to love Madonna and her music.

The video for American Pie isn’t just advertising, it’s propaganda for Madonna. This is some Leni Riefenstal-level manipulation in this video. But, it pales to the ego that happens behind the camera of The Next Best Thing.

Julius
This is a terrible movie. I’m talking, it’s terrible from the ground up. And, not even compellingly terrible. This is just a rotten movie.

Madonna plays a yoga instructor who has a whole bunch of unprotected sex with her boyfriend before he eventually dumps her and moves out of her house. The movie starts with the boyfriend moving out of the house, not with the unprotected sex. So, Madonna gets her gay best friend (Rupert Everett) drunk, and positions them so that it looks like they had sex. They probably didn’t even have sex. Rupert Everett wakes up the next morning in his black underwear, and I bet Madonna still had her panties on under the dress she still had on.

Anyways, she “discovers” she is pregnant and decides to pin it on Rupert, who doesn’t even question it. He’s not “Are you sure it was me?” He just rolls with it. He moves out of his cozy bungalow he rents from a rich gay couple and moves in with Madonna to help raise the child.

Fast forward 6 years, and Madonna finds Benjamin Bratt, who takes a yoga class of hers. They get along great, at which point they get engaged. But, Bratt gets the offer to move to the other side of the country and wants to take Madonna and the kid with him. Rupert, believing he’s the kid’s father, sues for custody. Not being the biological father, however, he’s going to lose until he brings Madonna’s ex into the picture who claims he wants to get to know the kid, but only visits the kid once. In the end, Madonna and Bratt have to stay in LA, where Rupert stalks their son at school.

Not only that, but everybody is reduced to stereotypes. Madonna is an egomaniacal manipulator. Rupert and the gays are the biggest cliches ever, where they discuss Ethel Merman and Judy Garland. Benjamin Bratt is initially the asshole, since he believes his career is more important than Everett’s life. Even the black rappers have fried chicken on paper plates in their studio.

When the movie isn’t enforcing all of the stereotypes you could ever want, it’s attempting to sledgehammer down the walls of bias. But, in those moments, The Next Best Thing is unbearable is not unbelievable. Take this lovely scene as an example, where Madonna’s son learns the word faggot.

All of these elements on their own are enough to make one run screaming for the hills. But, I haven’t even made it to Madonna yet.

Madonna

Oh, did I neglect to mention this was made by acclaimed director John Schlesinger. He directed people from Dustin Hoffman (twice) to Glenda Jackson to Laurence Olivier. He was responsible for Midnight Cowboy and Marathon Man as well as The Day of the Locust. This is an openly homosexual director who didn’t shy away from controversy now mincing words about his lead actress.

The Next Best Thing ended up being John Schlesinger’s final movie. He was admitted to a hospital by year’s end of 1999, had a stroke in December 2000, and finally passed away in 2003. In a letter written from the hospital, he wrote “I do not for one moment think that [Madonna and producer Tom Rosenberg’s] behaviour has not added to the reasons I have ended up here.” In other words, Madonna’s movies finally killed somebody.

That was a bit flip. What does Madonna have to say about John Schlesinger?

In the bonus feature from the original DVD, John Schlesinger said that Madonna was a control freak while Madonna said that John is a big ol teddy bear.

I’ve been leery to comment on behind the scene production rumors regarding Madonna, in part because some substantiation and credibility issues arose. For instance, in Body of Evidence, it has been claimed that Madonna’s acting coach up and quit because she thinks she knows everything. But, with The Next Best Thing, all the controversy came out into the open – with Rupert Everett spilling beans and – John Schlesinger’s letters coming into the public – and they all had to do with the final product.

The most evident sign of Madonna’s hubris is her addiction to the facial highlight. In this not-very-noir movie, somebody chose to have Madonna’s face filmed almost constantly with a slash of light cutting across her face. Rupert gets his fair share of this facial highlighting as well, mind you. But, Madonna could just walk into a room, and…bam! Look, she stumbled into a slash of light!

The good and the bad of the facial highlight is that if you notice it, you can’t stop looking at it. And, if you can’t stop looking at it, you’ll never notice just how terrible of an actress she’s being. In the above scene, you were probably too distracted by the highlight to noticed how she sounds like she has a cold when she says the word bimbo. Or, how foreign the emotions seem to her, like she’s never been dumped before, or that she doesn’t know what grief sounds like.

While it’s partially about her voice, sometimes the script makes her do some wacky things too. Like find a facial highlight while sitting on a toilet before holding up her breasts in a mirror with a sad face.

These scenes are as poorly acted as they are scripted. What’s truly noticeable is how Abby has traded in her sex drive for her motherhood. And, in turn, how Madonna turned in her sexual image for that of a clean-cut wholesome mother.

Originally, this movie was going to have Abby be impregnated by a turkey baster (which gets brought up as an in-joke later in the movie), but the real version is the more complicated version I stated above, which was concocted by Rupert Everett. When he brought up the idea to Madge, she told him that she didn’t want to do a sex scene, knocking the wind out of his sails. Madonna is conveying, through the movie, that she has completely exchanged her sexiness for a motherhood appeal.

But, before you think Madonna is awful in just the same boring flat way throughout the movie, she and Everett try to capture the zany screwball comedy.

Where Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant used the pacing to cement their relationships, Madonna and Rupert use the pacing to entertain the audience. And, that’s about it. This whole scene doesn’t belong anywhere in the movie, and the tonality of the scene is never seen again, including in later birthday parties where moments of subdued endearing silliness peek through the layers of serious moviemaking.

Of course, it’s not like Madonna has chemistry with anybody. She didn’t have chemistry with the guy who was dumping her, she doesn’t have chemistry with Rupert, and she definitely doesn’t have chemistry with Benjamin Bratt. Here’s their first date. Please don’t watch the whole thing because it just drags on and on and on, but I just left it there because…who knows, maybe you’re enjoying being bored out of your skull.

To sum up, Madonna can’t act. This script is terrible, waffling between reinforcing stereotypes, being mildly offensive, and being pious about being so progressive. She was a terror on the set and off. John Schlesinger blamed her for his collapse and subsequent stroke. The movie is a goddamned chore to get through. And, her face is highlighted to the point of distracting from her terrible acting.

Julius
To get through this movie, you need one thing: a case of beer. I’m not talking about a six pack, because for the one-rule drinking game, you need 7 beers.

Drinking Game

• Drink 2 oz of beer for every new set up where Madonna or Everett has a facial highlight

Hardcore rule (if 7 beers in 105 minutes isn’t fast enough), shotgun for every stereotype it reinforces. Please don’t get your stomach pumped on my account. Don’t drink if you’re underage, and don’t drink and drive.

Otherwise, you’ll never make it through this movie alive.

Results
Good Actress – Average Actress – Bad Actress: 7 – 1 – 5

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