Kenneth Branagh stars in The Proposition as a troubled priest who enters the lives of an extraordinarily wealthy and powerful couple (William Hurt and Madeleine Stowe) some time during the FDR administration, and becomes involved in various intrigues involving the couple's plan to have a child with the help of a brilliant young Harvard student (Neil Patrick Harris). Generally, when a studio film with big-name stars and impressive production values ends up skipping the theaters, it usually means that the movie is either difficult to market or simply godawful. Unfortunately, The Proposition is the latter, a stupid, lumbering soap opera filled with uninspired performances, ridiculous plot twists, and an overall contempt for common sense. The cinematography is handsome, and the score is lovely, but everything else about the film is pathetic, from the wooden performances of its three leads to a script that alternates between shaky expository dialogue and purple romance-novel prose. Hurt has always had a tendency toward stiffness, but here he's saddled with lines like, "But who will draw your bath for you so you can luxuriate in exotic bubbles from Paris?" Needless to say, Hurt does a nice job delivering that line without snickering, but that's about the nicest thing that can be said for any of the primary performances. The film's secondary players are similarly awful, though they, too, are stuck playing wildly implausible, self-contradictory roles. Harris' character, for example, is supposed to be the top student at Harvard, yet he behaves like a blithering idiot throughout the film's duration. Even the usually reliable Blythe Danner is unremarkable as the couple's feral housekeeper. The Proposition may have been tolerable had it approached its soap-opera plot with some degree of wit or irony, but unfortunately, it's been written and directed with all the brain-dead sanctity of an inspirational TV movie.