It starts off well, with some mournful narratives looking back on the fateful day. The build-up to the proposal is suitably dramatic: David (Woody Harrelson) and Diana (Demi Moore) are childhood sweethearts who run into debt. They have a weekend in Vegas where they win £15 grand, and in true yuppie fashion, have sex on top of the pile of money. Adrian Lyne's pornographic gloss, so irritating in Flashdance, works brilliantly in this moment as sex and money become intertwined. That of course leads to the moment where Robert Redford (okay, the character has a name but he's really just Robert Redford) asks to borrow Diana as a good-luck charm for his gambling. Then he asks to borrow her for a lot more. David and Diana turn him down, disgusted, but then they start to have second thoughts...
I was hoping this would be a humerously amoral film but it's actually very moral. The premise of "Would you sleep with a stranger (AKA Robert Redford) for a million dollars?" is abandoned for an exploration of how much strain a marriage can take. The film is slightly less sexist than it appears- Diana is unconsciously obsessed by money and the decision is a joint one- but the implication that David must be the one to forgive is quite sexist. After all, he did pimp her out!
The film's firm moral stance does make it more palatable, as does the presence of Robert Redford doing his Gatsby thing, but with such a juicy premise, they could have played on the moral ambiguity. Let's be honest, the moral compass of some of those female viewers seems way off anyway, so you might as well take it to those extremes. And the film starts off so well, but in order to please everyone they turn it into a typical Hollywood romance, which drags the pace down. Although to be fair, Harrelson is quite touching in the hippo moments (you'd have to watch the film to make sense of that- although even then, you might struggle to suspend disbelief). And Demi Moore is watchable enough.
There is actually some interesting social commentary in the film, underneath the soapiness, and it's certainly a conversation topic, so I'm inclined to say that if someone offers you a chance to watch it, it may not be such a bad proposal after all.