Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #116/Bad Material Girl My World of Flops Case File #168 The Next Best Thing (2000)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.
I recently began an even more screamingly essential deep dive into the complete filmography of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen.
I’ve also had the pleasure of writing about a series of Madonna movies for Todd in the Shadows. These fit right into my wheelhouse of terrible movies but they’ve also given me an opportunity to think long and hard about Madonna as an icon, performer and actress.
More specifically, it’s given me an excuse to explore Madonna’s myriad fascinating failings as a film actress and what they say about her as a complicated, compelling, contradictory and oftentimes extremely embarrassing human being.
When COVID-19 hit, for example, us rubberneckers and schadenfreude enthusiasts in pop culture media wondered just how Madonna would dramatically misread this fragile and complex cultural moment and release a flurry of bizarre, tone-deaf gestures reflecting that poignant lack of understanding.
We were not disappointed! Oh boy did Madonna deliver! First Madonna infamously posted a video on Twitter and Instagram where she called the coronavirus “the great equalizer” from a rose petal strewn bath in her mansion, pontificating windily, “That's the thing about Covid-19. It doesn't care about how rich you are, how famous you are, how funny you are, how smart you are, where you live, how old you are, what amazing stories you can tell. It's the great equalizer and what's terrible about it is what's great about it.”
This talk of COVID-19 making everyone equal in their vulnerability and humanity understandably did not strike a chord in common folk who had to risk death working night shifts at Wal-Mart to feed their family and consequently did not, in fact, feel like they were experiencing the same struggles as someone with literally hundreds of millions of dollars.
But Madonna knew that she could do even better. And by “even better” I of course mean “much worse.” So next up Madonna the sixty-two year old white woman decided to respond to the George Floyd murder with a video of her 14-year-old adopted son David Banda Mwale Ciccone Ritchie dancing to the Michael Jackson song "They Don't Really Care About Us.”
Even without the lingering shadow of the sordid, heartbreaking revelations of Leaving Neverland, a song by Madonna’s friend the suspected child molester whose original recording infamously contains the lyrics "Jew me, sue me, everybody do me/ Kick me, kike me, don't you black or white me” would be a decidedly curious choice for a protest dance in 2020.
The widely mocked gesture epitomized Madonna’s singular gift for taking complex social movements and ideas and making them all about her, her ego and her sense of herself as the ultimate ally.
Madonna’s intentions are invariably good. That’s what makes her perpetual stumbling touching as well as unintentionally comic at times.
But Our Lady of the Perpetual Blunder wasn’t done just yet. Then she favored a world forever wondering what the hell is wrong with her with a full-throated endorsement of Stella Immanuel, a black doctor with a supremely sketchy organizations called America’s Frontline Doctors.
Immanuel rose to fame when she stood on the steps of the Supreme Court and told the world that masks and shutdowns were not necessarily because a miracle drug known as hydroxychloroquine was the cure for COVID-19.
This led Madonna to publicly call Immanuel her “hero” and insist a vaccine for COVID-19 had “been found and proven and has been available for months. They would rather let fear control the people and let the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and sick get sicker.”
Not so sure about that, chief.
Madonna later deleted the post after places like the Daily Beast reported that Immanuel “has often claimed that gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are in fact caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches” but the damage to her reputation was already done. To give the poor woman credit, Madonna is seemingly always trying to do good. Why do the results end up being so egregiously awful so often?
The 2000 comedy-drama The Next Best Thing set out to cater to Madonna’s enormous queer fanbase with a socially conscious message movies that explored issues relating to gay men, particularly the complexities of parenthood and co-parenting as well as the institutional homophobia of the legal system and the world at large.
Despite being the final film of legendary gay director John Schlesinger, who won an Academy Award for Midnight Cowboy before directing Marathon Man and The Day of the Locust, with uncredited re-writes by gay star Rupert Everett and future gay TV powerhouse Ryan Murphy, The Next Best Thing feels like a script that was green-lit in 1988 when anything gay was considered shocking and exotic to a mainstream culture forever eager to push queer people to the fringes, and made it to the screen twelve years later without updating its premise to reflect changing social mores.
Granted, it’s a lot more common for queer folks to have children but in this tone-deaf, bizarrely dated misfire people damn near faint with shock at the very idea that a homosexual might procreate. Oh sure, they understand if it is explained to them slowly, using charts and diagrams, but otherwise they just can’t wrap their minds around it.
The Next Best Thing opens in 1992, with Yoga instructor and terrible human being Abigail "Abbie" Reynolds (Madonna, imbuing the character with her signature combination of artificiality and unlikability) getting dumped by what is apparently only the latest in a long line of losers.
Kevin Lasater (Michael Vartan) broadcasts his macho awfulness by calling Abbie’s gay best friend Robert (Rupert Everett) a homosexual slur, then dramatically announcing that he does not love her.
To get back at Kevin for dumping her, Abbie has Robert dress up as the film’s idea of a mincing, screamingly effeminate queen—big black beret, purple neckerchief tied flamboyantly to the side, purple blouse knotted at the waist to reveal a generous helping of pasty midriff—and then sends him into the recording studio to humiliate Kevin in front of his colleagues.
The only black characters in The Next Best Thing are the stereotypical tough, macho gangsta rappers who, needless to say, cannot believe a white boy they thought was cool and “down” and rigidly heterosexual is actually doing butt-stuff with the second coming of Paul Lynde on the down low.
The stoned black men bust a gut when Robert calls Kevin “Boopsie” and pretends they have an intense and exhausting sex life. “Hey Kev, look like your bitch need a shave!” one of these nameless, anonymous men of color insists, only to have the deeply embarrassed (what heterosexual man would ever want to be thought of as gay? Can you even imagine the indignity?) Kevin insists that the preposterous cartoon of campy homosexuality in their midst is not, in fact, his “bitch.”
When Kevin asks if Abbie is behind his get-up and banter Robert instead quips, “Is (Abbie) what you’re calling me this month to your chocolate-covered peanut gallery?”
If this scene sounds screamingly, even perversely unfunny but also casually and not so casually racist, sexist and homophobic as well, I can assure you that it certainly is!
This deeply embarrassing explosion of gay panic-rooted minstrelsy also clashes tonally with the rest of the movie, which is garish and melodramatic and dumb and bizarrely backwards, but not to a Norman, Is That You? extent.
Despite characters constantly talking about how beautiful Abbie is, and sexually skilled, and Madonna being lit differently than everyone else, with an insanely flattering, softening Barbra Streisand filter, she just cannot find a good man.
The Next Best Thing sadistically drags out the sexual tension by putting Robert and Abbie in scene after scene where they’re drunk, and flirting, and seemingly only moments from having sex despite Robert’s homosexuality.
Then these platonic soulmates get very non-platonic for thirty minutes of erotic bliss/confusion that changes their relationship and lives forever when Abbie gets pregnant and decides to keep her baby.
Robert throws himself into fatherhood, to the detriment of his love life and the best friends turned co-parents make it work until one day Abbie meets an impossibly perfect man in the form of Benjamin "Ben" Cooper (Benjamin Bratt), a dashing investment banker who takes an instant liking to Abbie’s son Sam (Malcolm Stumpf).
Robert, however, loathes Ben immediately because he sees him as a threat to his close bond with Abbie and Sam.
When Ben drops by to pick up Abbie for a date Robert tries to scare him away with yet another performative display of stereotypical flamboyance, cranking up the Judy Garland and scandalizing the heterosexual stud through his aggressive non-heterosexuality and unconventional relationship with Abbie and Sam.
In typically embarrassing dialogue, Ben asks Robert if he’s gay or just pretending to be gay, because, like the film itself, he just can’t wrap his mind around the idea of a gay man having a child, or people raising children together without being man and wife.
Robert is right to be skeptical of Ben, and not just because he seems too good to be true. Abbie’s well-heeled boyfriend has got a cushy job waiting for him in New York and is eager to take Sam with him.
In a third act twist that renders her already deeply unlikable character positively monstrous, Abbie discovers that Kevin is actually Sam’s father rather than Robert, an inconvenient truth she keeps from her best friend until she’s able to use it to destroy him.
The yoga instructor with the gay best friend and her charming and sensitive beau decide upon a seemingly uncharacteristic legal strategy in their custody dispute with Robert rooted in vicious homophobia and pure sadism.
They have an unnamed lawyer plead by the great character actor John Carroll Lynch argue that since Robert is gay he must be a drug-addicted, sex-crazed degenerate who would expose Sam to the unhinged debauchery of his amoral lifestyle if he were to share custody.
Furthermore, since Robert is not technically Sam’s father but merely someone who has heroically assumed and very deftly performed the role of father to a child he has no biological connection to, then he is unworthy of even calling himself a parent when the bloodless phrase “care-taker” is technically more accurate.
The heterosexual couple’s scorched-earth approach to winning custody is so cruel that it upsets Abbie as well as Robert but the honesty-challenged single mother has behaved too monstrously for her regret and remorse to ring true.
Madonna obviously deeply wants audiences to like her. That’s the curse of superstardom: when you’re that used to being not just loved but worshiped you get addicted to public approval. Yet there is nothing at all sympathetic or real about Abbie. Madonna struggles with being likable and sympathetic under the best of circumstances. She is utterly defeated by a script that exists primarily to serve her actorly ego yet ends up doing her a terrible disservice.
The Next Best Thing is so unforgivably phony and unconvincing that when it ends by informing us that Robert got over that minor matter of Abbie and Ben using his homosexuality to destroy him psychologically and legally in court, leaving him a burning husk of a man, and became happy co-parents and best friends with Abbie and Ben you want to yell at the screen to stop lying, for its own sake as well as yours.
Yay! Everything worked out! Who cares if none of it made any sense?
Writing about various Madonna movies for Todd in the Shadows and this column I’ve found myself wondering why Madonna has such a strong reputation for cinematic awfulness when her relatively limited resume as a film actress/documentary subject includes such winners as Desperately Seeking Susan, Truth or Dare, Dick Tracy and A League of Her Own.
Madonna hasn’t made that many movies but the bad movies she’s made are so egregiously terrible they take up disproportionate space culturally. Like Shanghai Surprise, Who’s That Girl and Cast Away, The Next Best Thing is so bad it seemingly counts as 10 bad movies, not just one.
That holds true of Madonna’s directorial efforts as well. That said, I do hope that Madonna continues to work in film for purely selfish reasons: anyone can make bad movies but Madonna has a unique gift for churning out world-class stinkers in which the best intentions lead to the worst films.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Fiasco
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