Grade: D

Verdict: Clenched and vague.

Details: Starring Madonna and Rupert Everett. Directed by John Schlesinger. Rated R for sexuality, partial nudity and language. 1 hour, 57 minutes.

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Review: Madonna looks miserable in "The Next Best Thing," like she's just been let out of deep freeze and is still defrosting, and she is not happy about it. Her frigid, impassive gaze and sparkless screen presence are fatal turnoffs in this trite and weak-willed dramedy that seems determined to shut out the audience. If it's strange to see the ostentatious diva not ignite the screen, it's even weirder to see her extinguish it.

Shot drably in shadows, paced like a funeral cortege, missing gaping chunks of plot and starring Ms. Personality, "Next Best Thing" is a dreary little journey that starts as a cutesy sitcom and nosedives into leaden soap opera. For such a pertinent topic as a straight mom and gay dad raising a child under one roof, this mawkish muddle feels altogether suppressed, cocooned in a muted gloom.

You'd expect bubbles and soda pop fizz and streamers from the sounds of (and trailers for) the movie. But no. It's a formula Hollywood picture whose oddly glum treatment would better suit a Belgian art film.

Madonna and Rupert Everett (real-life close friends) play Abbie and Robert, very best pals who'd make a dreamy couple if Robert weren't gay. The twosome luxuriate in a classic (cliched?) girl/gay-boy relationship: They absolutely adore each other. They implicitly understand, tolerate and tease their respective flaws and foibles. They paternally and playfully critique each other's dates and engage in healthy platonic jealousies. They're squeaky-perfect together.

Then, one night when they're quaffing martinis and dancing all over the place like Astaire and Rogers (like I said: perfect), their mutual admiration shambles drunkenly into the forbidden zone. Yep. They do it. And suddenly Abbie, an iron-abbed yoga instructor, is noshing on double hamburgers, outlandish conduct that in nutty sitcom land is shorthand for "she's pregnant."

Robert naturally elects to join Abbie in raising the baby. They will be a couple. But not, you know, a couple.

It's not insane to believe that all this is a setup for oodles of domestic shenanigans and diaper-changing capers. Pregnancy is worth at least three good dietary jokes, one morning sickness gag and a couple of hilarious, ill-timed labor pains. (We get only one here. Rip-off.)

Instead, Abbie is pregnant for five minutes. Her gestation period transpires in a montage of dissolves, during which her belly swells and she eats ice cream and she and Robert chuckle. Cue labor pains — and cut to the child's sixth birthday party.

Quizzically, we leap from Abbie's puffed paunch to a floppy-haired, 6-year-old boy named Sam (Malcolm Stumpf). We're given no chance to see the dynamics between straight mom, gay dad and son evolve in those colorful formative years. The movie makes us do all the heavy lifting, to take at faith that raising Sam has gone fabulously for the past half-decade, that Sam's a good kid, that love and devotion saturate every nook of this modern storybook household.

Even though I sort of bought it, I still had hunger pangs for what the movie left out. The story plays on fast-forward like this until Abbie meets a lip-smacking investment banker, Ben, played by buff Benjamin Bratt (TV's "Law & Order"). He is, we are to believe, her first date since Sam was born.

Abbie and Ben's whirlwind affair yields some pleasant if pat moments, and I actually grinned once or twice. But when the prospect of marriage arrives, the movie kerplunks into a child-custody drama that leaves Abbie and Robert's relationship riven with acrimony.

"Next Best Thing" wallows in its banality. This is ho-hum stuff, a feckless fusion of "Kramer vs. Kramer" and the Jennifer Aniston gay-straight love story "The Object of My Affection." But it's lacking everything that made those movies work.

A gig's a gig, but director John Schlesinger's willing participation in this project boggles, and if he's half-hearted about it, it shows. A sad day's come when legendary filmmakers, who produced a cluster of the most memorable films of the '60s and '70s, are stuck making soul-eating schlock. Schlesinger, of course, made "Midnight Cowboy" and "Marathon Man." And last week saw John Frankenheimer ("The Bird Man of Alcatraz," "Seconds," "The Manchurian Candidate") wearing the mantle of hack for the abysmal "Reindeer Games."

Besides Schlesinger's listless pacing here, Madonna and Everett generate a watery chemistry and approximately 2 1/2 sparks.

It's a troubling thing to witness. The couple's interactions are tentative — they lack a natural bounce. It's like we're watching filmed rehearsals. The impact of the events doesn't register. They're anti-cathartic.

Madonna's a discouraging revelation. She drifts through the movie clenched and vague. Never a soft woman, she seems to be getting harder with age, petrifying.

Everett is often superb, displaying a generous range of emotions that are anchored by a tough charm. He alone endows this "Thing" its modest watchability.

— Chris Garcia, Cox News Service