Bran versus donuts: the story says it’s about striving to balance both, but the movie serves us neither.
What was the point of this? What were they thinking? What was this movie originally supposed to be? (Incidentally: this isn’t the only working-girl-comedy with Aline Brosh McKenna‘s name on the script to cause me confusion…)
This feels like Broadcast News hijacked by Nicholas Sparks:
it uses the vocabulary of rom-coms, but says nothing romantic, and in ways that aren’t comedic. There’s even the archetypical running sequence near the film’s end, but the slow-mo shots look more like something out of a high-concept wedding video, and the character is running towards… her job.
Really: where is the “love” in this love story?
The side-“romance” between Rachel McAdams and Patrick Wilson‘s cautiously jaded (?) journalist doesn’t actually change either of them – in fact, Wilson maybe even regresses. The “tension” between thrown-together co-anchors Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton not only fails to provide actual comedy (much less any battle of wits or ideologies), it serves no narrative function and doesn’t go anywhere.
It’s not even a platonic love story between Rachel McAdams’ young, idealistic producer and Harrison Ford’s cantankerous veteran journalist, who learn only small, petty things from eachother that require mere degrees of change within themselves to respond to – hardly the stuff of passionate conflict and resolution. There’s a whole laboured convo (there are many, but let’s focus) between them about news versus entertainment, using the inspired metaphor of… wait for it… bran versus donuts. The story tells us it’s about striving to balance both. This movie serves us neither.
PS and I guess this film is further evidence of how Ford lost either his passion or his charisma for comedies: he at least seemed to be having fun way back in Working Girl, Right?
Further Viewing
My review may read to some like a “He’s so close… and yet he’s completely missed it. It’s supposed to be a non-romantic comedy.” In Beyond The Screenplay‘s discussion with her about her work, Aline Brosh McKenna states that Morning Glory is not a romantic comedy, and compares it to other work of hers, such as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which she describes as “stripping the genre” (from 8:59)…
… though, for me at least, the genre “subversion” plays merely as genre confusion. Aline Brosh McKenna’s biggest hit – bear with me – is also confusing, even if it does have way more going for it: