REVIEW; 'NEXT BEST THING' NOT EVEN CLOSE.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Film Critic

In looking for someone to blame for the truly abysmal soap opera of a movie called ``The Next Best Thing,'' it's natural to first turn to pop singer Madonna. After all, in her moonlighting career as an ``actress,'' Madonna has made some of the worst films of the past 15 years, including ``Shanghai Surprise,'' ``Who's That Girl,'' ``Body of Evidence'' and ``Four Rooms.'' She may have a magnetic presence in music videos, but ask her to open her mouth and emote and you've got the makings of a disaster.

And indeed, Madonna is pretty bad in ``The Next Best Thing.'' But it's not entirely her fault. She still can't act, but the screenplay by Thomas Ropelewski is such a ridiculous hodgepodge of cliches with stale political correctness that Meryl Streep would have a difficult time making it work.

Of course, Streep would never choose to be involved in a project this stupid in the first place. ``The Next Best Thing'' starts out a romantic comedy, wanders into fantasy and winds up a bitter melodrama, reducing its main characters to hateful ogres.

Worse yet, in its slavish desire to teach moviegoers a thing or two about gay issues and makeshift families, the film takes on a pedantic tone more suited to an educational movie. Remarkably, though, there's not one real scene or character to be found here. Everything is as artificial as Madonna's quasi-British accent.

Madonna plays a yoga teacher, Abbie, who has a hard time holding on to her men. This, despite the fact that she's smart and beautiful, not to mention a good cook and great in bed. When we first meet Abbie, her shallow boyfriend (Michael Vartan) is packing his belongings. Abbie goes into the bedroom and strips down to her thong underwear, producing this groan-inducing bit of Madonna-worshipping, vanity dialogue:

Kevin: It's not going to work this time.

Abbie: What?

Kevin: Your fantastic body.

He does leave and Abbie gets dressed and runs to her gay best friend, Robert (Rupert Everett), for consolation. After spending the better part of a day getting smashed, they wake up in each other's arms, having done the unthinkable. Abbie soon learns she's pregnant and she and Robert decide to move in together and raise their child as a family.

Flash forward six years and their son, Sam (Malcolm Stumpf), seems to be doing OK. (You would be too, living in a kind of opulent wealth that's most unusual for the offspring of a gardener and a yoga teacher.) Abbie has been celibate, while Robert conducts his affairs discreetly away from the family home. The family's tenuous cohesion is shattered, however, when Abbie meets a handsome investment banker, Ben (Benjamin Bratt), visiting Los Angeles from New York. Ben and Abbie fall hard for each other, and Robert, easy-going until this point, suddenly turns into a resentful, green-eyed monster. That's just the beginning, though, and ``The Next Best Thing'' soon devolves into a ludicrous courtroom movie with plot twists so ridiculously absurd that Perry Mason would have been thrown for a loop.

Screenwriter Ropelewski and director John Schlesinger manage the neat trick of making the audience hate every one of its characters (except for maybe Bratt's Ben, who's pretty much a cipher). That makes the fairy-tale ending seem even more of a cheat. Still, it is an ending. Which, apart from skipping this stinker altogether, is the next best thing for the dispirited moviegoer.

THE FACTS

--The film: ``The Next Best Thing'' (PG-13; sexual content, partial nudity, language, mature themes).

--The stars: Madonna, Rupert Everett, Benjamin Bratt.

--Behind the scenes: Directed by John Schlesinger. Screenplay by Thomas Ropelewski. Released by Paramount Pictures.

--Running time: One hour, 50 minutes.

--Playing: Citywide.

--Our rating: One star.

CAPTION(S):

photo, box

Photo: Madonna plays Abbie, a yoga instructor and mother, in ``The Next Best Thing.''

Box: THE FACTS (see text)