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Indecent Proposal
Paramount // R // April 16, 2002
List Price: $24.99 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
The Movie:
Indecent Proposal is one of the funniest films of 1993. It has quite the comic set up. A struggling young architect, David Murphy (Woody Harrelson) has married his high school sweetheart. And you aren't just told that she was his high school sweetheart. You get to see it, too, as the two human beings wear ghastly wigs and braces, and have funny hijinks at the beach. Her name is Diana (Demi Moore), and he likes to call her "D." It's cuter that way, you see, more intimate. She has her own integrity and spirit, too. She wears farm dresses, and a weird low slung back pack with shoulder straps that look like Mork suspenders, and a man's watch from the '50s. Though they have their contrived fights, they always end up making love, as yet another unattended household utensil melts in the background.
David and Diana, er, D, have some financial problems. Even though he spends all his free time designing a house that "sums up everything I believe about architecture," when he goes to build it, the recession hits, and they are both in financial straits and unemployed, even though they have a successful lawyer friend named Jeremy (Oliver Platt), one of those obnoxious friends that no one in real life would tolerate, only people in movies. Of course, David gets the bright idea of earning the money the old fashioned way—he and D will go to Vegas and win it all gambling. They actually go there. Looking like Mork and Andy Griffith on a blind date, they wander the gaming rooms of casinos; until first Billy Bob Thornton (in a cameo by the then-unknown actor and writer playing a "day tripper"), and then Robert Redford, finds them.
Bob is John Gage, a multi-millionaire who likes to gamble, and who is also, according to Jeremy, a "poon hound." This dog sniffs out D, and spends the rest of the movie trying to get her. The crux of Indecent Proposal is that Gage offers David a million dollars for one night with D. Will they decide to take it? Their lives will change if they do.
Well, it all gets more complicated from there, of course. The movie as a whole comes across like one of those terrible contrived arguments that married couples get into that everyone around them realizes could have been derailed about two seconds in. Indecent Proposal was one of the first wave of Vegas vogue movies. In fact, it was released around the same time as a another funny Vegas comedy called Honeymoon in Vegas, (1992) with Nicolas Cage in the Harrelson role, Sarah Jessica Parker in the D role, and James Caan in the high rolling Gage part. Don't get me wrong: IP has a typically smooth performance from that underrated master Redford, and the film does address that usually verboten Hollywood subject, how the heck people make a living in this crazy economy. But it isn't the most successful comedy I've ever seen.
Maybe it isn't a comedy. Indecent Proposal gathers together much of the same team as Fatal Attraction some six years earlier. Sherry Lansing produced, and Adrian Lyne directed. Though it was written by Amy Holden Jones (of the Beethoven series), the film has the same cinematographer and even set designer as the earlier film. Jones is adapting a novel by Jack Engelhard, whose source book, interestingly, had David and D as Jewish, and the Gage character as a wealthy Arab, which at least suggests a more complex moral debate. Instead, Lyne and company opt for a traditional Hollywood love story. You can tell it is a love story because there is a four note love theme pounded on a piano in the background.
The DVD
VIDEO: Indecent Proposal looks good for an almost 10 year old movie, and the 1.85:1, enhanced for widescreen televisions, is fine. Howard Atherton's Gordon Willis-inspired cinematography, designed to make Demi Moore's flesh look succulent, has all the earmarks of "prestige" cinema of the time: deep shadows, golden hues, natural seeming light coming in from side windows. It fits the romantic idea of the movie, and this reviewer failed to detect any significant flaws in the transfer.
SOUND: Sound options are the usual Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround, which is effective in the casino and party scenes, Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround, which also gets the job done, and a French 2.0 Surround option. In all these formats, John Barry's lush music sounds like it strayed out of a Douglas Sirk movie without knowing it was meant to be funny. English subtitles are available.
MENUS: A static menu with a few seconds of Barry's score in the background offers 16 chapters for what the box says is a 116 minute film (Maltin has 118).
PACKAGING: Indecent Proposal comes in a keep case with a reprint of the original poster on the cover, showing the kids having sex in color and Redford on the other side of the Fatal Attractionesque tear looking at the viewer, but in black and white. This poster also appears on the one page insert that gives the chapter list. The disc's label shows a pile of purple paper money.
EXTRAS:The film was one of the more poorly reviewed films of its time, but made some 106 million dollars off of a $30-plus million budget, and went on to make almost $300 million worldwide to date. In any case, Paramount has issued an almost supplements free disc. It doesn't even have the trailer, but it does have an audio commentary track by director Lyne. His chatter is intermittent; whole chunks of movie go by without his remarks, and generally they are on the order of "I really like the jump cuts here," and such like. The movie even steals Fatal Attraction's light flicking on and off moment (in this case Harrelson opening and closing some automatic curtains in a hotel room), but Lyne doesn't even note the similarity, and when a hair salon receptionist is shown in passing reading a copy of Backlash, which was highly critical of Fatal Attraction, Lyne prefers not to point it out.
Final Thoughts: In the end you realize that Indecent Proposal really could and should have been funny, and might have been, if someone with the energetic excess of a Paul Verhoeven had helmed it. Then the movie might have had the courage of its convictions.. The audio commentary track might be appealing to Lyne fans.
Indecent Proposal is one of the funniest films of 1993. It has quite the comic set up. A struggling young architect, David Murphy (Woody Harrelson) has married his high school sweetheart. And you aren't just told that she was his high school sweetheart. You get to see it, too, as the two human beings wear ghastly wigs and braces, and have funny hijinks at the beach. Her name is Diana (Demi Moore), and he likes to call her "D." It's cuter that way, you see, more intimate. She has her own integrity and spirit, too. She wears farm dresses, and a weird low slung back pack with shoulder straps that look like Mork suspenders, and a man's watch from the '50s. Though they have their contrived fights, they always end up making love, as yet another unattended household utensil melts in the background.
David and Diana, er, D, have some financial problems. Even though he spends all his free time designing a house that "sums up everything I believe about architecture," when he goes to build it, the recession hits, and they are both in financial straits and unemployed, even though they have a successful lawyer friend named Jeremy (Oliver Platt), one of those obnoxious friends that no one in real life would tolerate, only people in movies. Of course, David gets the bright idea of earning the money the old fashioned way—he and D will go to Vegas and win it all gambling. They actually go there. Looking like Mork and Andy Griffith on a blind date, they wander the gaming rooms of casinos; until first Billy Bob Thornton (in a cameo by the then-unknown actor and writer playing a "day tripper"), and then Robert Redford, finds them.
Bob is John Gage, a multi-millionaire who likes to gamble, and who is also, according to Jeremy, a "poon hound." This dog sniffs out D, and spends the rest of the movie trying to get her. The crux of Indecent Proposal is that Gage offers David a million dollars for one night with D. Will they decide to take it? Their lives will change if they do.
Well, it all gets more complicated from there, of course. The movie as a whole comes across like one of those terrible contrived arguments that married couples get into that everyone around them realizes could have been derailed about two seconds in. Indecent Proposal was one of the first wave of Vegas vogue movies. In fact, it was released around the same time as a another funny Vegas comedy called Honeymoon in Vegas, (1992) with Nicolas Cage in the Harrelson role, Sarah Jessica Parker in the D role, and James Caan in the high rolling Gage part. Don't get me wrong: IP has a typically smooth performance from that underrated master Redford, and the film does address that usually verboten Hollywood subject, how the heck people make a living in this crazy economy. But it isn't the most successful comedy I've ever seen.
Maybe it isn't a comedy. Indecent Proposal gathers together much of the same team as Fatal Attraction some six years earlier. Sherry Lansing produced, and Adrian Lyne directed. Though it was written by Amy Holden Jones (of the Beethoven series), the film has the same cinematographer and even set designer as the earlier film. Jones is adapting a novel by Jack Engelhard, whose source book, interestingly, had David and D as Jewish, and the Gage character as a wealthy Arab, which at least suggests a more complex moral debate. Instead, Lyne and company opt for a traditional Hollywood love story. You can tell it is a love story because there is a four note love theme pounded on a piano in the background.
The DVD
VIDEO: Indecent Proposal looks good for an almost 10 year old movie, and the 1.85:1, enhanced for widescreen televisions, is fine. Howard Atherton's Gordon Willis-inspired cinematography, designed to make Demi Moore's flesh look succulent, has all the earmarks of "prestige" cinema of the time: deep shadows, golden hues, natural seeming light coming in from side windows. It fits the romantic idea of the movie, and this reviewer failed to detect any significant flaws in the transfer.
SOUND: Sound options are the usual Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround, which is effective in the casino and party scenes, Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround, which also gets the job done, and a French 2.0 Surround option. In all these formats, John Barry's lush music sounds like it strayed out of a Douglas Sirk movie without knowing it was meant to be funny. English subtitles are available.
MENUS: A static menu with a few seconds of Barry's score in the background offers 16 chapters for what the box says is a 116 minute film (Maltin has 118).
PACKAGING: Indecent Proposal comes in a keep case with a reprint of the original poster on the cover, showing the kids having sex in color and Redford on the other side of the Fatal Attractionesque tear looking at the viewer, but in black and white. This poster also appears on the one page insert that gives the chapter list. The disc's label shows a pile of purple paper money.
EXTRAS:The film was one of the more poorly reviewed films of its time, but made some 106 million dollars off of a $30-plus million budget, and went on to make almost $300 million worldwide to date. In any case, Paramount has issued an almost supplements free disc. It doesn't even have the trailer, but it does have an audio commentary track by director Lyne. His chatter is intermittent; whole chunks of movie go by without his remarks, and generally they are on the order of "I really like the jump cuts here," and such like. The movie even steals Fatal Attraction's light flicking on and off moment (in this case Harrelson opening and closing some automatic curtains in a hotel room), but Lyne doesn't even note the similarity, and when a hair salon receptionist is shown in passing reading a copy of Backlash, which was highly critical of Fatal Attraction, Lyne prefers not to point it out.
Final Thoughts: In the end you realize that Indecent Proposal really could and should have been funny, and might have been, if someone with the energetic excess of a Paul Verhoeven had helmed it. Then the movie might have had the courage of its convictions.. The audio commentary track might be appealing to Lyne fans.
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