Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
11/13/10
By my count, my average sleep-deprived
day consists of 30 minutes of shower, dress and pack lunch, a 45-minute
commute to work, eight-and-a-half hours spent at work (counting lunch),
45 minutes to get home again and then about six hours of leisure time before
it's off to bed to start the whole thing over. Weekends tip the scales
back toward me, but from Monday through Friday, I and pretty much everyone
else with a full-time job spends more of their waking hours at and getting
to it than we do with family, friends and whoever else fills “our” time.
Odd then that for all the movies about finding love and friendship in our
personal lives, there are very few movies about finding and loving a special
job and the people you work with there. Morning Glory is such
a movie, writer Aline Brosh McKenna's fairly skillful running of the romantic
comedy playbook between a girl her dream job rather than her dream guy.
Oh, there's a guy there, but they don't have much chemistry and he mostly
sits there confused while she does all the talking. But when Rachel
McAdams' Becky Fuller is at work as the producer of America's worst morning
talk show, Morning Glory really shines. Oh, to find a job
I loved like that...
Just when she thinks she's
about to get promoted at the local morning show she works on, Becky Fuller
(Rachel McAdams) is instead fired, leaving her to pepper the news world
with resumes, only one of which lands her an interview. At 4th-place
IBN, morning show Daybreak is a 47 year-old institution, but one that has
fallen on hard, hard times. That's probably why network executive
Jerry Barnes (Jeff Goldblum) would even consider hiring someone of Becky's
youth and inexperience to run it. And hire her he does, leaving her
to survey a dull show fronted by longtime anchor Colleen Peck (Diane Keaton)
and self-absorbed online porn addict/purveyor Paul McVee (Ty Burrell).
Becky's first act is to fire him, but that leaves her with not a penny
in her budget for a replacement. She gets creative, scouring the
anchors the network has under contract but isn't using, and discovers that
not only is journalistic legend Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford) being paid
millions every year to do nothing, but if he's offered a job and refuses
after six consecutive months without working, his contract is void.
So she offers him the Daybreak gig and gets for her trouble a bitter prima
donna who refuses to do anything but hard news stories. As he and
Colleen can't agree on anything, not even who says “Goodbye” at the end
of the broadcast, ratings get even worse, and Jerry informs her that the
show will be canceled in six weeks. Now the gloves come off:
there's nothing Becky won't put before the Daybreak cameras to get those
numbers up. But can The Great Mike Pomeroy do his part? And
will all this pressure ruin Becky's chance with the magazine show producer
(Patrick Wilson) with whom she seems to have found love?
Morning Glory starts
with two assets that can't be understated: it puts McAdams in a position
where her vulnerably courageous likability is at is most formidable (her
work in Red Eye is still the gold standard for the modern self-starting
damsel in distress) and offers Ford another chance to comically riff on
the third act of Great Men, a niche that is making the third act of his
own career increasingly exciting. This is a movie that primarily
rises and falls on the strength of its performances and they're very good.
Keaton is hilariously shameless, while Goldblum is quite effective in an
unusual position as the executive who turns on Becky just as quickly as
he took her side. The Daybreak staff is filled out with engaging
characters like John Pankow's long-suffering producer and Matt Malloy's
weatherman who'll literally do anything Becky asks him to on the air.
Watching Becky forge them into first a team and then a family is a lot
of fun, and when the climax tests those connections, it's surprisingly
effective. Romantic comedies rise and fall on whether the movie can
really make us fear the loss of the relationship at their center, and here
Morning Glory is a winner.
On the subject of actual
romance, not so much. Because the film is at its heart a workplace
buddy movie between Becky and Mike, love interest Adam seems to be here
mostly so no one will worry that there's anything going on between the
leads, much like how the girlfriends in 70's cop movies kept their audiences
from fearing Dirty Harry might be gay. While Wilson puts his usual
charm behind the role, there are really no sparks at all between Becky
and Adam, compounded by the fact that all the bumps in their road seem
to come from her going off the deep end about a perceived slight that seems
to have occurred between scenes. Her self-sabotaging anxiety, something
to which many similarly driven young women will relate, is well played
by McAdams, but that also means that the Man For Her is going to be someone
around whom she can actually relax, and I never saw that between her and
Adam. Seeming to sense this, the movie keeps going on and on about
what a catch he is, which no doubt served to either flatter or embarrass
Wilson, but didn't to much to persuade me.
Back at the office, the movie
mostly gets the parts of the TV news business those of us who like to read
entertainment magazines know right, except for the weird mechanics of the
show's looming cancellation, which Becky asks Jerry not to tell anyone
about as if it wouldn't be a headline on every entertainment website.
In fact, it seems that not only is the fate of the show still up in the
air on what would have been its last day, but none of the people working
on the show STILL seems to know about it. The script lets Becky drop
the cancellation bomb twice on different characters, and the first seems
to barely react, while the second led me to think “You didn't even tell
HIM? No wonder you guys have no chemistry”.
But its most successful creation
is Pomeroy, clearly inspired by the fall of CBS anchor Dan Rather (for
whom Mike is mistaken in one scene). Who Mike might have been in
his prime remains a mystery (although Adam worked with him on the nightly
news and calls him “the third worst person in the world”), but now his
every action is in one way or another about his anger at being dismissed
from his anchor position. He disdains celebrity in all its forms
because it's the heart of the modern news that replaced his. And
he'll use every contractually negotiated clause to force people to put
him at the center of their world if they won't do so of their own free
will. Working with her hero is a big part of Becky's dream job, but
Mike can't stop demanding the treatment he feels he's earned long enough
to actually earn it, and it's a big testament to Ford's starpower that
we keep wanting him to change. And he's pitch-perfect in the closing
scenes, never seeming to stop being Mike Pomeroy just because he may have
allowed for a few new possibilities in his life. And his climactic
Daybreak segment is perfectly written, acted and staged because it doesn't
just accomplish what it needs to in regards to the characters, but also
feels like it would really have the desired impact on the people watching
at home.
Roger Mitchell, who directed
Notting Hill, one of the seminal modern romantic comedies, and the
highly underrated ethical drama Changing Lanes, shows a real sense
of how to run a formula without getting desperate or pandering to the dimmer
bulbs in his audience. Between his command of tone and good work
with the actors and McKenna's well-constructed script, Morning Glory
feels more like an organic story that happens to coincide with the Romantic
Comedy Playbook than most romcoms that are actually about romance.
And I honestly feel like Becky and Daybreak will live happily ever after,
which is more than I can say for the stars of most love stories... or Becky
and Adam, for that matter... |
