SEE YOU IN THE MORNING
SAY ANYTHING . . .
There’s nothing really startling about either Say Anything. . . , Cameron Crowe’s first feature, or See You in the Morning, Alan J. Pakula’s 12th, except that neither one is a bore, an insult to the intelligence, or a remake of something else; and both have fairly large groups of well-defined characters and a central love story that is at once believable and positive.
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See You in the Morning deals with the diverse emotional adjustments and complications that ensue when a divorced psychiatrist and a widowed photographer, who each have two children, fall in love and get married. It has the unusual distinction of successfully delineating at least a dozen important characters in about two hours, not one of whom is a stock figure, but this pleasure is secondary to the revelation of seeing what Jeff Bridges, who plays the psychiatrist, Larry Livingston, can do when he is working full throttle and with the right kind of material.
The brilliance of Bridges’s performance here, which deserves the much-abused adjective “Brechtian,” is that as it illustrates Larry’s feelings and his diverse ploys for dealing with the world, it comments on them as well. Like Andre Dussollier’s performance as the lawyer in Eric Rohmer’s Le beau mariage, it allows us to see the wheels of calculation that turn behind every tactful gesture, as well as the wavering uncertainties, the barely perceptible cracks that are never quite papered over. The movie’s title refers to a popular ditty that Larry likes to sing to himself, and in a way this song functions for him just as his habitual smile does–it’s an expression that is sincere, yet also somehow willed rather than natural.
Part of the appeal of Say Anything is its refreshing freedom from most of the cliches and conventions found in so many other recent teen movies. Interestingly enough, the project grew out of conversations between Cameron Crowe and executive producer James L. Brooks about an intense father-daughter relationship, with the teen romance for the daughter only developing later. In the finished product, the father-daughter story is background and the romance comes to the fore.
Whether a crowded love story of this kind is something of a contradiction in terms is an open question that the movie as a whole seems to be implicitly raising–how much, for instance, Larry’s success as a father and stepfather is or isn’t a part of his relationship with Beth. It’s a middle-aged issue in contrast to the more youthful perspective of Say Anything, and the emotional registers that are explored are every bit as nuanced.
