The Next Best Thing casts Madonna as a free spirited soul (some stretch of casting there) who has a one night stand with an old friend and soul mate Rupert Everett. But that's not likely to happen too often as Everett is a gay man with whom she confides her innermost.
I think Everett's character must have been based on Roddy McDowall who was a confidante to many of the rich and glamorous and unlike that other gay man who did that as well, Truman Capote, McDowall never wrote any tell all memoirs.
It rarely happens in real life, but a blessed event came from that mating and Madonna and Everett decide to move in together, not marry, but raise the child as a mother and father with each leading their separate lives. It actually does work for a while.
Madonna really gets into the mother role and Everett's a great father figure. But he never forgets his social life with friends and lovers like Neil Patrick Harris and Mark Valley.
But then Madonna meets Benjamin Bratt who wants to get married and that puts an end to the arrangements.
The Next Best Thing while a sincere effort in its own way of showing the complicated problems that gays and lesbians have with the raising of children, their own children at that, it sadly degenerates into the kind of soap opera that one finds on the Lifetime Channel. It's not a horrible film, just will never be on anyone's ten best list.
