THE FORCED nervous energy and desperate eagerness to please of the wakey-wakey TV show is evident in Morning Glory. The chirpy Becky (Rachel McAdams), aptly likened to Gidget by one character, is on her way up. She ascends from New Jersey to her job as the producer of a despondent morning news show, essentially fourth-ranked in a field of three networks. Becky takes a celebrated but now languishing former anchorman, Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford), and partners him with the current AM show host, Colleen (Diane Keaton). Colleen knows Pomeroy of old, and she loathes him.
As Pomeroy, Ford is a very amusing grumpus—a newsman frozen in distaste for the parade of exotic animals, cooking tips and celebrity chat that makes up a Good Morning America–style show. It isn’t much of a stretch for Ford; the character is just a little surlier than the dogged action heroes he has been playing: “I lunched with Dick Cheney!” he growls, in tones that make us think that he was even more ornery than the Angler himself. Ford and Keaton have a comedic rapport that’s like an elegant version of the “Jane, you ignorant slut” routine between Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin in ancient episodes of SNL.
The clever-clever script is by Aline Brosh McKenna, whose The Devil Wears Prada was similar. Maybe what was intended was something like the mentoring of Peggy Olson by Don Draper on Mad Men. The film’s lack of a point of view is worsened when we catch what it’s saying: entertainment and hard news had a battle, and entertainment won—and Pomeroy should succumb to the judgment of the audience. If the man was too old to go back into the field, he could become a commentator, using whatever he learned about the world over sandwiches with Cheney, but the way this story plays out, there’s no room for him to do anything but clown or give cooking tips. Morning Glory has terminal third-act problems, the kind that force a trip into sudden-death overtime, just to reassure us that Becky has a choice in her career. The cluttered soundtrack by David Arnold matches the visuals by Alwin H. Kuchler. Onscreen, it’s all confetti-bedecked murk, with too many interiors and crowded art direction, the exception being an impressionistic walk at nightfall across one of New York’s bridges, likely the Brooklyn. A little help comes from the romance with a rich ex-Yalie (Patrick Wilson), an actor usually cast to indicate sinister too-handsomeness. A moment of Becky’s gal pals discussing his hotness (as if he weren’t the only datable man in the movie) is supposed to square the deal. Too much reiteration sinks Morning Glory; it’s not as if we can’t tell, like Mary Tyler Moore, that Becky is going to make it after all.
PG-13; 102 min.
