Moviegoing:
Screwball Success
Morning Glory
Let’s get this straight: Morning Glory is a movie that is all about its stars. Rachel McAdams, Harrison Ford, Diane Keaton and Patrick Wilson may be dressed and housed in the manner of New York professional types, but the profession that their characters are engaged in is entertainment, and so the roles become windows through which actors of varying degrees of diva-hood are equalized on a plane of screwball entertainment. Mr Ford shows us what an awful pain in the neck he could be if he took himself seriously. (Oh, doesn’t he?) Ms Keaton plays the Julie Kavner role that Woody Allen could never bring himself to cast her in. Mr Wilson, having impersonated something of a jerk in his last picture, is back to being Mr Ordinary Nice Guy (with Beautiful Features).
And Rachel McAdams is finally the star that she has been bursting to be. She is not half of a romantic team, or the member of an unusual family. She plays a stand-alone figure, notwithstanding her character’s unobtrusive romance with Mr Wilson’s. Her Becky Fuller, a television producer, has nothing going for her but her brains and dedication. Her beautiful smile doesn’t exactly hurt, but Becky is not interested in the things that can be achieved with nothing more than a beautiful smile. She wants to succeed. She wants everything that she does to succeed, be it a little story about ballerinas or her dreams of promotion. Never have I seen a character burn with so much pure energy. In Broadcast News, to which Morning Glory has understandably been compared, Holly Hunter’s interpretation of the Becky Fuller role depended on a host of functional psychopathologies — anxieties, nervous tics, and a crippling disdain that all functioned like symbiotic intestinal bacteria: she was crazy, but she wouldn’t have gotten anywhere otherwise. There is none of that here. All of this Becky Fuller’s problems are external to her, and she solves them by imposing her own robust good sense upon them. Morning Glory is not a movie about a successful television producer who saves a faltering morning show. It’s about Rachel McAdams, making the world a better place just by being in it. That is what the great movie stars do.
As such, Morning Glory is a movie to be seen and surrendered to, not analyzed. But I can’t resist highlighting the early scene in which Ms McAdams mounts her first display of wizardry. In the telling, it will sound simple. At her first staff meeting, Becky is barraged by a fusillade of miscellaneous questions that no sane person could keep track of. The last question comes from the show’s male co-host, a creepy guy who has actually propositioned Becky and who wants to know “Why did I have to stop watching ‘Banging Granny on line’ to come to this meeting?” Becky wilts, and we’re terrified. Ms McAdams sends us a false signal: we think we can see that Becky is thinking about how to restructure these meetings so that they’re manageable. A pretty wet solution, but it’s something. We’re resigned to a standard dénouement: Becky will buy time and then go back to her office, pound her head on the wall, and wonder what she has gotten herself in for. But no sooner has Ms McAdams taken us up to the very brink of this disappointing prospect than she starts spitting back answers with all of the questions’ incoming energy, and then some. She is supremely in control, and her triumph is a joy to see. At the end, she raises her head to the co-host and tells him, by the way, that he’s fired. Does this sort of thing happen in real life? Every once in a while — and only this sort of thing. Here we have the Hollywood fantasy version, and its magic is thrillingly effective.
Then, of course, Becky Fuller’s troubles begin in earnest. Her principal problem is coaxing cooperation out of a has-been who’s on contract to her network. Once a fabled news anchor, he is more or less in the position of a buggy-whip manufacturer, too proud to retool his act. Mr Ford’s Tom Pomeroy is as intractable as a chip of Gibraltar, and the fun of Morning Glory is watching Rachel McAdams use all the body English at her command to move him, in tiny, squeaking pushes, to where she needs him to be.
Screwball comedies let us laugh people who think that they can’t stand one another discover the awful truth that they can’t live without one another. Morning Glory extends this proposition to the world of work. Becky, Tom and Colleen Peck (Ms Keaton’s co-host) interact without the faintest latency of romance. (It would be a stretch to regard Tom as a father-figure for Becky; she’s pretty much beyond father figures.) Instead of the promise of love, Becky brings the promise of success, and it is her own success that finally kindles Tom. Which is as it should be: in the great fairy tales, nothing succeeds like success.