Indecent Proposal
First screened in April 1993 / Reviewed in August 2024
Director: Adrian Lyne. Cast: Demi Moore, Woody Harrelson, Robert Redford, Oliver Platt, Seymour Cassel, Rip Taylor, Billy Bob Thornton, Billy Connolly. Screenplay: Amy Holden Jones (based on the novel by Jack Engelhard).VOR:②
A minor time capsule for the early-90s sex drama, especially given its massive box-office, but actually a rather wan execution of a spicy setup.
I just watched Indecent Proposal for the first time since I, uh, saw it with my parents in the theater as a 15-year-old. I kind of thought I'd failed to remember the movie, but actually the movie fails to remember itself. For a project very successfully sold as sharp provocation, Indecent Proposal is actually quite timid about its notorious premise, in which billionaire John Gage (Robert Redford) offers young, newly bankrupt couple Diana and David (Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson) $1 million for, as he puts it, "one night with your wife." Even that level of verbal euphemism is a beige flag that this picture, directed by Fatal Attraction's Adrian Lyne, can't or won't get it all the way up to Go There.
So, forget about any sex scene between peak-glam Demi Moore (30 when filming) and new-leather Robert Redford (56). When David spirals out afterward, it's a totally nonspecific possessive-envy thing, just a hurled wine bottle and a lot of bloodshot, "But what did you do??"s. When Diana briefly sort-of-dates-I-guess the billionaire, outraged and hurt by her husband's emotional abandonment, Indecent Proposal won't go near the question of how far their relationship [sic?] has gone. They share a few limo rides, attend an auction, etc. We see nothing of his/their bedroom; I don't even think they kiss. Oh, wait, they do. It says a lot that I forgot. Several plot beats turn on how both Diana and David are too high-minded to accept the million-dollar windfall that came from her helicopter-to-shipboard booty call with Gage. All this coyness about capital from a couple who literally just fucked on a mattress bestrewn with 250 hundred-dollar bills—the movie's one signature, Sade-assisted image.
Certainly the film has insulated itself from the thorniest aspects of Jack Engelhard's novel (which, yes, I read, because I was studious in high school, and because Woody Harrelson was sweaty and bare-chested on the cover), in which the billionaire was a sheikh named Ibrahim, the young and professionally struggling husband was Jewish, and his wife had committed social-class suicide from goyish American aristocracy to marry him. Omar Sharif was right there!
There's not necessarily anything "strong" in the totally watchable but bothersomely bland Indecent Proposal, a movie that's both swaggery about its gutsiness and totally afraid to be about what it's about. If there's any case ro be made, it might be for John Barry's score, as handsomely orchestral as per his usual, though hardly his most interesting music, and dulled by association with the movie's general privileging of lacquer over libido. The best stuff all happens before the Deed, and mostly before Mr. Moneybags even shows up. Moore and Harrelson are fully convincing as a young couple who enjoy each other, are hot for each other, and are just barely dumb enough to think a night in Vegas will get them out of a $50,000 lake of red ink. Lyne directs a good scene where the couple confers in a diner about taking one last spin at the roulette wheel (love the cutaway to the waitress) and an even better dead-of-night sequence as Diana and David debate Gage's offer, with a well-played mix of honesty and disingenuousness from each of them.
"From how we started, we have nowhere left to go," Diana tells Gage at one point, when she's still protesting that these two can't remain a couple after one night. But surely half the audience knows she's talking about Indecent Proposal itself, which fails to move almost anywhere beyond its ostensibly prickly premise. It's one thing to make a film that will keep viewers and especially couples talking in the car afterward. It's another to make a movie where the car conversation is identical if you haven't even seen it. Diana and David both get less specific as Indecent Proposal continues. Seymour Cassel and Oliver Platt are dumbly underused. Herbie Hancock and Sheena Easton make weird, momentary cameos that must have delighted some producer. By the second half you can barely hear the movie over the sound of a single wheel spinning—maybe or maybe not a roulette wheel.
The worst vacuum in the whole thing is Redford, a reluctant actor through much of his career and at times an arrogantly disengaged one. He shades in precisely nothing about John Gage and plays every scene from the same, single dimension. One senses how much he doesn't want to be here, which is exactly not the aura this arousable, intrusive, and presumptuous guy should have. (Oliver Platt does shake him awake and even elicits a credibly genuine smile in their one scene together, which ought to have been longer.)
I suspect a movie about the making of Indecent Proposal might be more interesting than the finished product. Moore and Lyne evidently didn't get on. Harrelson spoke to press about the weirdness of multiple sex scenes with a good friend who was still the wife of an even better friend, especially since he admitted to finding them a turn-on. Would you have pretend-sex with a buddy, married to a famously ornery, grudge-bearing partner who is also your pal, especially if millions of people around the world were going to watch you do it and all you got for your trouble was a Razzie?
How much do we imagine was scripted for Moore and Redford together that the latter refused to play, though without the temerity to actually walk off the set? How vexed was this screenplay, credited solely to Amy Holden Jones—who may or may not have been the pirate who pilfered a famous speech from Citizen Kane, of all things—even though Oscar-winning Dead Poets Society scribe Tom Schulman is listed as a first-time producer? Why are three high-caliber talents in their field prominently listed as "additional editors" in the closing credits, even as you imagine lead editor Joe Hutshing (JFK, Jerry Maguire) probably could have handled this assignment in normal circumstances? Which of these four came up with the midfilm abstract cut to camcorder footage of a hippopotamus baring its teeth? Why are there three co-billed costume designers, including Redford regular Bernie Pollack, suggesting a male lead who's not interested in collaborating with whomever the production has hired?
That's a lot of implied chaos on a film that came out polished and glassy to a fault, and would have benefited enormously from more mess, more perspiration, more danger. Maybe they should have occasionally swiveled the camera around. Grade:C
