Would 'Indecent Proposal' move the needle 25 years later?

“Indecent Proposal” was a hit before a single ticket was sold.

It started with a hook and a genius piece of casting: a 50-something billionaire proffering a million dollars to sleep with your wife is a cheap and sleazy premise, but when that 50-something billionaire is played by a shockingly well-preserved Robert Redford, what initially felt cheap and sleazy suddenly becomes an exquisitely obscene come-on. Then came the trailer: an elegant, narration-free seduction scored to Sade’s “No Ordinary Love” that still stands as a masterpiece of marketing.

“Indecent Proposal” presented itself as high-toned trash, and the tawdry premise proved every bit as irresistible as Paramount Pictures expected. It raked in a then-astounding $18 million over its April 9, 1993 opening weekend and held down the top spot at the box office for four weeks straight on its way to grossing $266 million worldwide. Critics mostly hated it (Roger Ebert’s review was an outlier), but the movie was totally critic-proof: people flocked to theaters to find out if the fictional marriage of glamorous Demi Moore and aw-shucks Woody Harrelson could survive a profitable night of adultery in the company of the Sundance Kid.

The film’s runaway success prompted numerous entertainment writers and cultural critics to castigate it for being yet another “women-as-barter” movie in the vein of “Pretty Woman” and “Honeymoon in Vegas.” Prominent feminist Susan Faludi (whose 1991 book “Backlash” is used as a sight gag in the movie) remarked that Redford’s character was essentially “raping a woman with money.” None of this put a dent in the film’s box office, but the sheer volume and vehemence of these criticisms did suggest that the film might not age quite as well as its Faustian philanderer.

If “Indecent Proposal” were marketed in the same way 25 years later, six months into the #MeToo era, with the dilemma framed specifically as a transaction between two men (Redford pointedly asks Harrelson for “one night with your wife”), social media would be ablaze with opprobrium. It is, on the surface, a relic of a far less progressive time.

But the film is not the marketing, and in the context of the movie, Redford’s possessiveness is meant to play as suavely sexist; he’s a ruthless corporate raider, viewing the marriage of Moore and Harrelson, hit with financial calamity, as a company vulnerable to a hostile takeover. Director Adrian Lyne and screenwriter Amy Holden Jones (who directed and co-wrote the 1982 feminist slasher satire “The Slumber Party Massacre”) are well aware they’re juggling dynamite, and while their decision to play it as an unabashedly sentimental love-conquers-greed morality play isn’t always elegant (the frequent voice-overs from Moore and Harrelson are excruciatingly sappy), Lyne’s perfume-commercial visuals and John Barry’s lush score make for an alluring package.