Despite Hurt’s Talents, This ‘Proposition’ Is Easily Declined

There ought to be a law: A movie as thunderingly bad, as deliriously preposterous as “The Proposition” should at least be fun instead of a dreary, dragged-out bore.

You have to wonder what a ludicrous and lurid period soap opera is doing up there on the big screen in the first place. You wonder even more how its makers attracted such a large and prestigious cast headed by Kenneth Branagh, Madeleine Stowe and William Hurt and including Blythe Danner, Robert Loggia and Josef Sommer.

You might also have thought that Boston high society tear-jerkers went out with Olive Higgins Prouty--of course, the various films of her “Stella Dallas” and “Now, Voyager” will still resonate long after “The Proposition” is forgotten.

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It’s 1935 and Hurt and Stowe are among the Boston area’s richest and most glamorous couples. (Think a Back Bay Henry and Clare Boothe Luce). He’s a financier and she’s an emancipated woman who writes novels that get banned in Boston, natch. They are madly in love, live in a brick colonial-style palace, but the one thing that would make their happiness complete eludes them: a child. Hurt is sterile, and Stowe wants to experience pregnancy, so adoption is out.

Their lives start to unravel spectacularly with Hurt’s choice of a surrogate father, a bright but incredibly naive Harvard law grad (Neil Patrick Harris) who falls in love with the beautiful woman he is paid 25,000 (in 1935 dollars) to impregnate. (C’mon, artificial insemination was possible in 1935.) Soon to complicate matters massively is the arrival of Branagh, the son of Hurt’s bitterly estranged London-based brother. Branagh has just been named an assistant priest in charge of charity programs to the church where Hurt and Stowe worship and which they support generously.

There’s no point in outlining writer Rick Ramage’s dizzying plot complications, real jaw-droppers every one of them. Now an R.W. Fassbinder or a Pedro Almodovar would have played Ramage’s script for camp pathos and pitch-dark comedy, working up compassion for mere mortals caught up in absurd and drastic collisions of passion and fate.

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What director Lesli Linka Glatter gives us is a clunky, grafted-on proto-feminist sensibility, an unyielding earnestness and an increasingly slow pace clogged further by Stephen Endelman’s sticky, syrupy score. Not even David Brisbin’s lush production design has any style or much authentic sense of period--the same goes for costume designer Anna Sheppard.

The one good thing you can say for this clinker is that while everyone else is acting their heads off, Hurt is giving us a beautifully, quietly defined man of strength whose love for his wife is truly profound. It’s a wonderful, thoughtful performance wasted in the wrong movie.

* MPAA rating: R, for some sexual content. Times guidelines: There’s also murder, death, adultery.

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‘The Proposition’

Kenneth Branagh: Father Michael McKinnon

Madeleine Stowe: Eleanor Barret

William Hurt: Arthur Barret

Neil Patrick Harris: Roger Martin

Robert Loggia: Hannibal Thurman

Blythe Danner: Syril Danning

A PolyGram Films release of a PolyGram Filmed Entertainment presentation of an Interscope Communications production. Director Lesli Linka Glatter. Producers Ted Field, Diane Nabatoff and Scott Kroopf. Executive producer Lata Ryan. Screenplay by Rick Ramage. Cinematographer Peter Sova. Editor Jacqueline Cambas. Costumes Anna Sheppard. Music Stephen Endelman. Production designer David Brisbin. Art director Kenneth A. Hardy. Set designer Adam Scher. Set decorator Tracey Doyle.. Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes.

* At selected theaters in Los Angeles and Orange counties.