It's 1992. Abbie Reynolds (Madonna) is an L.A. yoga teacher. Her best friend Robert Whittaker (Rupert Everett) is gay. She gets dumped by music producer boyfriend Kevin Lasater (Michael Vartan). They go to the funeral of their friend David (Neil Patrick Harris)'s gay partner Joseph. Abbie wants a baby and Robert assists during one drunken night. She gets pregnant. His father (Josef Sommer) is angry while his mother (Lynn Redgrave) is happy. Abbie and Robert decide to raise the baby together. As their boy Sam grows up, their simple arrangement gets less simple. Sam has questions. Abbie starts dating perplexed Ben Cooper (Benjamin Bratt). Robert hires Elizabeth Ryder (Illeana Douglas) to sue for custody.This should be a drama. There seems to be a desire for this to be a comedy but the subject matter does not allow the funny. At best, this could be Kramer vs Kramer and I can't see how that could be accomplished either. It's really a hopeless case and Madonna does not help. They could rewrite this a million more times and it still won't work. It's all problematic and the child seems to be lost in the mayhem.

This film drew the usual raft of competing bitchy one-liner put-downs from all the critics. No surprise there, because the film is, on balance, a failure. But for many fans of Madonna - those who want to see that volcanic stage personality burst forth on screen FINALLY - this was one of the most frustrating experiences of her career. Because it's a film that could have been very good, and even started nicely enough. But the script took a rapid turn off the highway and became a lumbering, runaway truck heading into a canyon. Neither Madonna nor Rupert Everett nor director John Schlesinger could escape the wreck.I agree that the film hit the wall after Abbie learns she's pregnant. It's that the film tried to carry all sorts of leaden political baggage instead of being a FILM. Having set itself up as a send-up of contemporary L.A. life, thinking itself so hip and modern until it goes too far, there was a lot of promise for this movie. Instead of the boring, groan-inducing turn the relationship took, it could instead have been a funny take on two highly self-absorbed people bumping up against the utterly selfless task of parenting, and alternately reaching their limits. Madonna and Everett would have run away with such characters and given them all sorts of humanity and comic touches.But instead, the screenwriters reached their limit of creativity and murdered the film. I feel bad for both Everett (whose career nosedived after this film tanked) and Madonna, who had just come off a Golden Globe for "Evita" and a raft of Grammys for "Ray of Light".How could the studio have done this to them? Who are the idiots who wrote the final screenplay?There are funny, quirky moments, though. Madonna even has a few chances to poke fun at herself, and Everett has a funny turn by utterly queening out just to get even with one of her nasty exes. But those isolated moments just make "The Next Best Thing" even sadder to contemplate.

Hundreds of years from now, I imagine historians and archeologists, not to mention film preservationists, will spend years and years gazing in puzzled horror at Madonna's body of film. It will evoke feelings similar to the nausea, fear and disbelief we feel now while studying Mayan hieroglyphics of wholesale human sacrifice and ritual slaughter. Only much less interesting, naturally. What is it about Madonna? In movie after movie we have to endure the excruciating process of her struggling with all her might to bring a human emotion to her face. This Herculean labor, brought to its absolute zenith in Evita, but not much abated here, may be great fun for afficionados of porn acting, but for the rest of us: sheer torture. Then there's her voice. She delivers her lines like a tenth-grader playing Hamlet's mother, but with less conviction. Madonna seems entirely incapable of expressing intelligence or emotion, but if she would just let her hair down and act like the good old all-American tramp she is, all might be forgiven. Alas, she seems to have some curious delusions of grandeur. She is the most self-conscious bad actor who ever disgraced a movie screen, and yet she doesn't have the nerve to be camp. Is it possible to be wooden and plastic at the same time? Madonna manages to make Jenna Jameson look like Judi Dench. The movie? Couldn't tell you a thing about it.

Mercilessly condemned by viewers and professional critics, this comedy-drama is not very good; but I have seen films that are a lot worse. A young woman named Abbie (Madonna), who is straight, has a one-night fling with her best friend Robert (Rupert Everett), who is gay. The result is that she gets pregnant. Abbie and Robert agree to raise the child together; but complications ensue when Abbie falls in love with someone else.The first part of the film is lighthearted, and plays like a music video, with some good songs, like "Steppin' Out With My Baby". By the time we get into the second half, however, the lightheartedness has morphed into bitterness and controversy, a change in tone that is jarringly out of sync with earlier sequences.But an even bigger problem is the casting of the two leads, and the Robert character. Madonna tries hard to be a convincing Abbie; her performance isn't bad, really it isn't; she's just a little too wooden. But her celebrity persona as a musical pop star overwhelms all effort to make her seem like some average homebody. As a result, I would have preferred another actress.I did not care for Robert at all, with his exaggerated attempts at witty banter and his fluttering about, typical gay stereotyped behavior, vain and self-absorbed. Later, he becomes rigid in his ability to compromise, a character contrivance that only serves to advance the film's plot. And then Rupert Everett, with his hammy overacting, makes the already flamboyant Robert character almost unendurable. Everett's British accent in a Southern California setting is totally out of place. Almost any other actor of comparable age could have rendered a less painful performance.What makes the film bearable is some good music, including Don McClean's old song "American Pie", and a nifty performance by Malcolm Stumpf as the child, a performance that was thankfully lacking in precocious behavior so often seen in child characters.If they had reworked the script in such a way as to have a more consistent storyline, toned down the Robert character, and chosen different performers for the two lead roles, "The Next Best Thing" might have been better received. As is, the film is interesting mainly for its music, and as a textbook case of what can go wrong when script and casting mistakes are not corrected.