Review of Indecent Proposal

Diane (Demi Moore) and David (Woody Harrelson) are a married couple who spend a night in Las Vegas when they encounter a billionaire John Gage (Robert Redford). Because they are broke and jobless, they make a deal with John that they get $1 million for the mortgage and life savings in exchange for Diane. Indecent Proposal, the book, in which the movie is based on, isn’t just a morality tale about marriage and monetary greed. It’s a tackle on more complex ideas, such as religious quarrel, biblical temptation, spirituality versus greed, and skill versus luck. However, for the movie, Adrian Lyne and Sherry Lansing dumb down the book’s interesting themes in favor of a generic blockbuster with big names, happy ending and other romantic movie tropes that would have been laughed off from The Player. For instance, the movie drops out the Arab and Jewish tensions from the Faustian love triangle, hence abandoning any religious significance. They switch locations from Atlantic City to Las Vegas, probably because it was dirt-cheap and more convenient for Hollywood. Finally, the couple was never high school sweethearts in the novel, whereas in the book the wife, Joan, was already married when the two met and the husband, Josh, was a Holocaust survivor. Although changes have to be made for an adaptation to work as a film, the ones in Indecent Proposal made the project look formulaic and generic. With the remake about to be in progress soon, I just hope that it’s more faithful to the book than its predecessor.

(2 Kissing Hippos out of 5)