The Proposition (Reviewed on August 4th/98)
Starring Kenneth Branagh, Madeline Stowe, William Hurt, Neil Patrick Harris
1998 has not been a very good year for Kenneth Branagh. First he starred in Robert Altman's pretentious mess, "The Gingerbread Man". And now he's in "The Proposition", a well-acted but dull period piece.
The film tells the story of a very rich man (Hurt) who wishes to have a baby with his wife (Stowe), but is sterile, thus creating a bit of a snag in his plan. He decides to hire a surrogate (Harris) of sorts to father his child, but complications arise when the surrogate becomes emotionally attached to the wife of said rich man.
Where does Branagh fit into this convoluted scheme, you ask? Well, he portrays a priest who is new to the local parish, and who also has a shady past. It really doesn't matter, anyway. By the time all the secrets are revealed, the viewer has lost interest long ago.
"The Proposition" is a film that can't seem to decide what genre it wants to fit into. It's starts off as a run-of-the-mill period piece, but after about 30 minutes, it begins jumping wildly from one type of film to another. In certain cases, this can work (see "Pulp Fiction" for such an example), but here it just comes of as an unpolished mess. And, worse of all, the movie can't even finish what it starts. It opens with Branagh's character telling someone the story of what really happened to these four people, so the film is a flashback. By the end of the film, one would expect that the movie would come out of the flashback and into the present. This doesn't even happen! "The Proposition" has gotten totally wrapped up in it's multpile forays into different genres, that it completely disregards what has occured at the beginning of the film.
The acting, on the other hand, is quite good. William Hurt, an actor who has become quite complacent in his own smugness as of late, breaks out of that mold with an exciting portrayal of a man who has all the money in the world, but, in the end, finds that it is completely useless. And Doogie Howser himself, Neil Patrick Harris plays a character who is a polar opposite of that famous TV doc. Madeline Stowe rounds out the cast as the woman who is caught in the middle of all three of these men, and she is very convincing in her self-doubt and constant confusion.
Which brings us back to Branagh, a usually brilliant actor. Here, as in "The Gingerbread Man", he seems to be wandering aimlessly throughout his settings. There's no spark or energy to his performance; he merely seems to be cashing in a paycheque. Let's hope he works himself out of this rut soon. It would be a genuine shame if he spent the rest of his career making unfocused garbage like "The Proposition".
** out of ****
Dave "Loopy" Nusair dnusair@chat.carleton.ca
; "The Artist Formally Known As Prince is now going by just The Artist. ; : Despite this, I will still refer to him as The Fruit." : ; -Norm MacDonald ;
Dept. of Good Vibes, Come visit my Reel Film Reviews site Carleton University at "http://chat.carleton.ca/~dnusair"
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