The edifying and entertaining spectacle (not in the ways intended) of Hollywood high rollers wrestling with a Moral Question. Here's the question: What if a perfect stranger were to offer a happily married couple a million dollars for one night with the wife? Or to put it another way: Does everything have a price? Or another way: Can happiness be bought? Or another way: Has someone here just fallen off the turnip truck? To preserve the hypothetical purity of the issue and not to cloud it with anything that resembles real life, the couple must be storybook. Namely: Demi Moore, poster girl for Cosmetic Surgery, with airs of snootiness and snottiness sufficiently approximate to Self-Esteem and High Principles; and Woody Harrelson, kinda cute, not in a Rob Lowe or a Ken Doll kinda way, but in a kinda boyish, kinda goofball, kinda nonthreatening and noncompetitive and nonoutshining kinda way. And the issue's purity will be further preserved by the casting of Robert Redford as the indecent proposer. (Wives across America are expected to start silently calculating what they would accept to bed down with Robert Redford: a thousand? a C-note? no charge?) Indirectly and without half-trying, the movie enacts to a fare-thee-well the Hollywood mind-muddle. Sex (read "passing pleasure," read "commercial blockbuster") may be "just sex," but it can all the same be "good sex" (i.e., make money). The True Love (read "work of art") of a couple of Ordinary Average Common Little People is all well and good as long as the Little People are portrayed by bankable superstars and are swathed in trendy photography and a high-concept plot (i.e., make money again). Money no doubt can't buy everything, but it can at least buy Demi Moore, Woody Harrelson, and Robert Redford, together with the rest of the production values or "assets" or "investments" that guarantee a good return on the dollar (i.e., make more money). The proper question is not: Why would Robert Redford, for example -- Redford above all others -- Redford the de Medici of American independent filmmaking -- waste his time on such a project? The question is: For how much would he be willing to waste his time on it? Directed by Adrian Lyne. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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