Indecent Proposal (1993)

Directed by Adrian Lyne. Starring Demi Moore, Woody Harrelson, Robert Redford, Oliver Platt, Seymour Cassel. [R]

A happily-married couple (Moore, Harrelson) encounters a desperate financial situation, and they hope to win the money they need at a Las Vegas casino; they go bust, but get an offer that’s not easy to refuse from elegant billionaire Redford: $1 million for one night with the wife. A shuttered, contrived drama, too orchestrated down the stretch to thoughtfully explore the ramifications of the premise (ditto Adrian Lyne’s earlier hit, Fatal Attraction), andtoo guarded to tickle viewers’ lurid curiosities. Working off Amy Holden Jones’s loose script treatment of Jack Engelhard’s novel, Lyne makes the artistically shrewd decision to keep the “million dollar night” offscreen so it can be left to our imagination just as it is for Harrelson, but since so much else goes wrong, they might as well have depicted it in all its exploitative glory to satisfy expectations for steamy stuff between the two headliners instead of just a couple of brief love scenes between the married couple. It’s an admittedly intriguing setup (most moviegoers remember the one-sentence plot description, but can’t recall what happens after that fateful evening), and aside from the use of banal expository narration at the beginning, it sets out on firm enough footing amid despair without imagination—need money, go to Vegas! Overwrought jealousy and contrived decisions, like how Moore turns in Redford’s direction even though he reinsinuates himself into her life on shameless, vindictive terms, drive the second half into a ditch of artificial implausibilities. Initially lambasted on misguided grounds that the movie is sexist, apparently oblivious to the fact that it’s not two men bartering for the rights to a woman but a woman with agency making difficult (and perhaps lamentable) choices for her and her partner’s future; it’s easy to make that mistake, however, when too many of those faulty late scenes are seen through Harrelson’s resentful eyes instead of Moore’s conflicted ones. Billy Connolly appears as himself during the auction scene.

42/100