The Morning After (1986, Dir. Sidney Lumet)
Synopsis:
Alcoholic, failed actress Viveca van Loren (Jane Fonda) wakes up in a strange apartment next to a man with a knife in his chest. She calls her ex-husband Jackie (Raul Julia) who advises her to go to the police. She decides against this however, and tries to flee Los Angeles. She is thwarted by the Thanksgiving holiday queues and whilst leaving the airport she bumps into ex cop Turner Kendall (Jeff Bridges) who is sympathetic to her. As the police start to close in on her, Viveca begins to wonder who she can really trust.
Some films seem to be forgotten over time, despite the presence of a great cast and a great director. This seems to be the case with The Morning After, which is rarely mentioned in discussions of Lumet‘s work — perhaps not that surprising in a career that starts with 12 Angry Men and goes on to include Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico and Network — and yet many of Lumet’s (slightly) less well known films such as The Hill, The Offence, Prince Of The City and The Verdict have gone on to be rediscovered and re-evaluated, so why hasn’t this one? Jane Fonda deservedly got nominated for an Oscar for her performance here and the short scene about 10mins into the film where bursts into tears and tries to convince an airline assistant into getting her a seat on one of the many packed flights to San Francisco (the film takes place on Thanksgiving) not only explains why, but also reminds you of what a fabulous actress she can be. The film also has Jeff Bridges just a year after his success in Jagged Edge and the late Raul Julia, a year after his Golden Globe-nominated turn in Kiss Of The Spiderwoman, both giving superb performances; all of which makes you wonder why this film seems to have been largely forgotten and is only available as a Region 1 DVD on the Warner‘s Archive collection — which releases overlooked films from their back catalogue as small batch DVD-Rs.
Lumet is a master at dropping you into the middle of a complex story with the bare minimum of exposition. Here, we go straight into the story, even postponing the opening credits until 5 minutes into the movie when Jane Fonda’s character leaves the dead man’s apartment. We and she find out who the dead man is at almost the same time, through a news interview playing on the tv in his apartment. Fonda’s reaction to waking up next to a dead man is nicely and realistically handled and, whilst I have no idea if it was intentional or not, I found it amusing when I re-watched the movie for this post that we can clearly see an exercise studio next door to the bedroom as the camera tracks over to the bed — perhaps a sly wink to the fact that Fonda had spent most of the 80s releasing exercise videos and that this film was her return to acting afterwards. It’s hard to believe Lumet put that there unintentionally, just as it seems equally hard to believe the long shot of her character walking past a piece of graffiti saying „You are alone“ a few minutes later isn’t meant to be a comment on her character’s state of mind. Lumet’s rarely credited with visual style though there’s plenty here thanks to cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak‘s lighting and camerawork and Lumet’s choice of angles and locations which often show off the less glamorous side of L.A.
The film’s most daring quality however, is that neither Fonda or Bridges’ characters are particularly likable or sympathetic: She‘s a manipulative drunk and he‘s a bigoted ex-cop. Even the happy ending feels muted and understated as does the climax, making the film feel more like a character study than a thriller at times. There are plenty of suspenseful moments though — when she realizes someone else might be in the dead man‘s apartment because the cat is trapped in a closet that was open before or the shock of finding that the body has somehow been moved to her apartment — all of which are helped by Joel Goodman’s superb editing. All in all, it’s an intriguing film which often takes unexpected turns and deserves to be mentioned more than it is.
