Brushing Out The Mothballs
by DANIEL D'ADDARIO
dir. Roger Michell
102 minutes
The last time morning-shows were at the forefront of American minds after around 10 a.m. each day was in 2005. That was when Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer fought, blonde-on-blonde, for not just the eyeballs but the sympathies of the American viewer. Couric won the battle but lost the war – her Today was and is ever the top-rated, but she went to the nightly news and everyone hated it. (I watched the first night and only remember her breaking the story that Suri Cruise actually existed.) Sawyer went to the evening news a few years later, and was, I think everyone agreed, fine. Now Matt Lauer, the second most unfortuitously balding man in the world after Jude Law, wades amidst the weird Bush-Kanye imbroglio of the last week and seems to be positioning himself for something “greater.” Daytime TV is all about getting out and doing other things, retaining a bit of energy for the serious work that comes later.
Not so in Morning Glory. In this new film, about a daytime-news producer who winds up tasked to save a national news show because she is Rachel McAdams, daytime is all. The movie is crammed with cultural signifiers from mid-Bush era, when Couric vs. Sawyer was big news: McAdams and Patrick Wilson hit their heights of people saying they would eventually be huge stars around then, and everyone remembered Diane Keaton was alive between 2003 and 2005. Even the celebrity guests McAdams books for Daybreak – Eva Longoria and 50 Cent, who performs “Candy Shop” – should be brushing mothballs out of their hair.
Morning Glory is full of people towards whom the viewer feels goodwill and they are all awful. Like a remake of Network, the film hinges on the (metaphorical!) seduction of an older news veteran (Harrison Ford playing William Holden) by a producer with bright ideas and boundless repressed energy (Rachel McAdams, you are no Faye Dunaway). In Network, Holden’s literal seduction, as well as his ceding control of his news department to Dunaway, who turned it into a weird, hugely-rated joke, was a tragedy. Even for the mid-1970s, the film is a little heavy-handed, but it left no room for doubt about what any deviation from straightforward news coverage meant: schizophrenics on the evening news and an Angela Davis reality show.
McAdams’s re-imagining of Daybreak begins with hiring Ford away from the evening news and continues by begging him to do everything he never thought he’d have to do. The viewer is constantly elbowed in the ribs to acknowledge how horrible a team player Ford is, and the fruit plate in his dressing room is probably an excessive demand, but consider whether, at your job, you’d suddenly want to start getting Tasered and playing with wild animals and undergoing needless medical exams.
William Holden’s onscreen wife, Beatrice Straight, won an Oscar for telling him off for five minutes – Morning Glory has no similar person, to speak up for the Ford who once was, to remind him of his standards. We are left with an impression of a man running on the fumes of reputation who will show up where there is money and do as little as possible – a perfect argument for McAdams’s methods, and perfect casting of Harrison Ford.
By film’s end, McAdams, of course, has saved Daybreak by turning it into gonzo journalism, Jackass plus that daily hour where Kathie Lee gets drunk on TV. She’s obsessed with the body and its limits, and book segments on the orgasm, roller-coaster riding, and electrolysis. She cheers when Keaton spontaneously kisses (really kisses) a frog, and even when Keaton and Ford fight on-air: it’s good for ratings!
"The battle between news and entertainment has been going on for forty years!," McAdams says to Ford, cutely flipping her bangs. "Guess what? News lost." Go, girl! But he still won’t indulge her. When Ford breaks the story of a scandal involving the governor of New York, McAdams is only excited that cameras caught the police cars pulling up – that it bears all the signifiers of what is tabloid, even as Ford rattles off financial details that are already lost to my memory. The next week, her real triumph happens –getting Ford to cook a frittata on air.
This all happens when McAdams is interviewing for a new job, at Today. She was so good at finding the schlocky that she might rise to the pinnacle of her field (and presumably NBC consented in some way to the portrayal of their news department – the whole sequence is shot at 30 Rockefeller Plaza). She can’t leave, she decides, her “family” at Daybreak, a family whose patriarch has finally decided being an authority figure is no fun.
Faye Dunaway, in Network, would never have made the same mistake. She rose in the TV-news hierarchy not because the movie’s by the writer of The Devil Wears Prada, so of course the girl gets the job offer; but because she was spooky-good at her job, and she knew what her job was. She would never have giggled at Keaton kissing a frog – she’d just have made a mental note that all anchors had to kiss amphibians a minimum of twice a week. And she’d never have confused her workplace for a family. In 1976, we were all still pretending there were values greater to a capitalist society than workplace success.
But, yay, the girl succeeds and the Natasha Bedingfield song plays. “Success” is highly contingent, even in this irony-free film – she has not gotten promoted and Daybreak is not a Howard Beale Show-style hit. She merely gets to keep her job for another year, as Daybreak has staved off its cancellation.
But that’s the happiest of endings for McAdams, whose striving and focus on working within the bizarre and familiar grammar of daytime TV has seen her rewarded. Part of that striving was convincing a newsman that the news was important, as long as it was packaged as gossip, snuff films, and porn. McAdams tells Ford, at the turning point of his shift into Lauerland, that the institution of daytime news faces pre-emption by “soap operas and game shows.” For all Dunaway’s flaws in Network, she’d never make a good chick-flick heroine, but at least she knew such a pre-emption would make no difference.
Daniel D'Addario is a contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in White Plains. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about Easy A.
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