Morning Glory

One of the heaviest subject of satire comes from the all-to familiar area of the news broadcast. With how backwards and phoney some can be, the constant split between wanting to entertain and wanting to educate, and the worldwide connection that it has with the world, allows for a lot of juicy mockery on various sketch shows and movies. With that in mind, Morning Glory had the potential to create a full movie around this kind of dive into the turmoils and mechanics surrounding such an elusive yet public medium but is sadly tasked with being a mindless current romantic comedy, so there is unfortunately little hope of cleverness shining through. Aspiring news producer Becky Fuller (played by Rachel McAdams) is suffering through all-to-familiar story line of most rom-coms within this era of being unable to hold up a relationship or a job despite everything pointing to that being ridiculous.  Desperate for work, she is hired on by network executive, Jerry Barnes (played by a weirdly serious Jeff Goldblum) to work for a morning news program named Daybreak, one that is slowly sinking and very quickly failing. Becoming the new executive producer, she tries to motivate the staff and manages to hire on famous but recently fired news broadcaster Mike Pomeroy (played by Harrison Ford). He proves to be more work than he is worth, refusing to do any of the soft and fluffy material that the program does and is constantly clashing with Becky and his co-host Collen Peck (played by Diane Keaton). Becky tries to juggle the stress of handling Mike’s constant nagging, holding a serious relationship with fellow worker Adam Bennett (played by Patrick Wilson) and is left alone in trying to save Daybreak from setting forever. With a standardized and cliched plot, this movie requires a lot of good material and talent behind it to really make it shine, but it struggles to be anything more than another chick flick that mum’s go out to for movie nights. With mixed critical reception and not even being able to make its money back at the box office (which is something these kind of movies should normally be able to do) the story wastes some good potential, the characters are bland, the acting is pretty flat, the jokes aren’t funny, and it ultimately fails to leave an impact.

The funny thing about this set-up is that despite the story being very predictable and following a direction that has been done a million times, the initial premise is actually one that warrants comedic potential. A news broadcast office could feature some eccentric but realistic people that could naturally lead to comedy, and it can easily lend itself into some decent satire of the idea of journalistic coverage often having to clash with writers (and sometimes even news casters) who inject their own viewpoints into what should be an unbiased delivery. Discussing the separation between news for entertainment and news for gaining knowledge of global affairs is a topic that could be tackled in a funny but smart way, and how both need to co-exist so both can remain relevant and watchable. However, the movie seems to ignore or forget those possibilities and replace them with a stale narrative that’s easily to predict, along with a forced romance that only seems to hamper the movie rather than enhance the drama. This more than likely comes from director Roger Mitchell, who despite working on critical acclaimed material like Changing Lanes, Venus, and Notting Hill (which is in itself very similar in tone and style to this film), he probably just isn’t the choice to take this story into a more analytical but fun direction, as this one comes across fluffier and more mindless. The film isn’t plagued with too many groaner moments or painful jokes thankfully, but it just seems to go about its business being safe and bland without any notion of trying something outside of the expected rom-com bubble. The person who wrote the screenplay for this movie, Aline Brosh McKenna, is also responsible for writing the screenplay for The Devil Wears Prada, a much more infamous and beloved chick flick which tackled an industry that could absurdly cruel and cutthroat under the guise of being spotless and ”for everybody”, so she clearly has the capabilities to work with this idea. While it doesn’t outwardly rip-off anything too strongly from that movie, fingerprints can be felt everywhere and similar inklings can be seen within (like a younger more perky and energetic worker having to clash with an older more experience yet cynical superior) but whilst that movie at least had some enjoyably mean-spirited moments and an occasional good funny moment to block out the lame characters, messy script and hypocritical message, this film doesn’t get the decency. What keeps the movie from flopping as hard as it could is the same reason that it can’t be that strong a film; it plays its story and characters so safe and generic that the whole movie feels like a light fog, noticeable and harmless, but completely avoidable and quickly forgotten about.

When characters in comedies don’t click, it really halts and possibly ruins the movie; identifiable and entertaining characters are the bread to the story’s butter, without them the whole project can fall apart. For the most part, the characters are either too weak and underwritten or even slightly irritating to be memorable or even that likeable. Rachael McAdams as the lead doesn’t leave the much of an impression. While certainly not a bad actress by any means, she’s not really one that screams a unique identity unless she’s given material to work with, and here, she doesn’t bring anything that any other female comedian couldn’t do, and her perkiness comes across as too forceful and unnatural than anything, but to her credit, she does give effort and it does come across as someone who could be an effective boss in this space, from the sense of being someone who can inspire and get stuff done rather than as someone whose cold and domineering. Maybe if the writing was better and the directing was more solid, something could have come of it. Patrick Wilson as the boyfriend is written too bland and understanding to be interesting, Jeff Goldblum is completely wasted as the straight man in a comedy (who wants to see Jeff Goldblum as the normal person in a movie?), and Diana Keaton sounds completely lost in all her scenes and is just going with whatever first take they do. One of the worst actors in the movie is surprisingly Harrison Ford as the news anchor. After Harrison Ford came back from a break from acting, there was this feeling that he was overcompensating for his time away and trying to act incredibly tough and mean to still seem cool, and it never worked especially not here. Not only considering how detestable his character is and that there’s practically nothing redeeming about him despite the film trying to shoe-horn something in at the end, the weak writing and constant screen presence starts to get pretty annoying really quickly.

For a romantic comedy, the two worst elements of the movie are the romance and the comedy. The romance feels like it hinders what could be a cliched, but small likeable movie, and the comedy never has any lines that stand out or any drastically funny moments that get any attention. The only time things get a little entertaining is when the network is losing ratings, so they start doing things more drastically, like Ford and Keaton passive aggressively bickering on camera underneath the credits to hide what they’re actually whilst grinning daggers back at the other, or the overly smiley weatherman becoming the pawn of several dangerous stunts, and that is the stuff that gets there ratings up, that actually works and is a nice knock on how violence and aggressive material regardless of how mindless and pointless it is, can sell more than positive news. Outside of that, the lines are standard, the physical stuff mainly only consists of McAdams slipping every once and a while (which is one of the oldest and lamest tropes in these kind of movies), and since the characters are so poorly set-up, none of them get many distinct quirks to play off of. The movie also has some traditional cheesy elements from other rom coms of its type, including the shots of the city, the fades of overlapping faces, the corny pop songs, even some of the more standard shots by cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler just feel straight out of an older romance movie.

Morning Glory hasn’t got much of a glimmer within itself, and the formula is too old fashion at this point to come across as charming. For what it is, it seems to be more mildly inoffensive rather than shockingly bad or anger inducing. There’s nothing worth watching in the movie, but there are far worst and far more mean-spirited comedies and romances of its type. If anything, the fact that it had good potential and had a good cast behind it is what makes it so underwhelming, it’s like an old-fashion news show that’s been on too long and needs to be let off; it’s more sad that it can’t escape its weak romance, poor handling of a standard story, and weak if not annoying characters, as opposed to actually producing anything that staggeringly painful. Not a horrible sitting, but not worth checking in on none the less, this is a program that definitely should have been given the cut.