Morning Glory (2010)

Morning Glory arrives from 2010, a romantic comedy-drama about a young television producer named Becky who inherits a failing morning show and a hostile veteran anchor. Roger Michell directs with the gentle, unforced competence of a craftsman who knows exactly which lane he occupies. The film wants to be Broadcast News with softer edges and no interest in the accountability questions that made Broadcast News matter. It settles for charm, and it mostly earns the charm it claims.

On the matter of representation, the cast is anchored by white stars and the supporting players of color appear briefly and without comment. Rachel McAdams carries the picture, and the film allows her ambition and competence to stand as the engine of the plot. She pushes back when a man tells her she is too consumed by her work, and the screenplay treats this as an ordinary romantic grievance instead of a thesis. The result is a mild feminist current running beneath conventional career-versus-love machinery, present but never announced. Harrison Ford spends much of the runtime delivering speeches about journalistic integrity versus the indignity of cooking segments. These are the film's most sermonizing passages, though they aim at television culture, not at society at large.

The picture possesses no interest in race as a subject, no environmental concern, no economic critique of the network system it depicts, and no engagement with bodies, neurology, sexuality, or the historical record. What remains is a likable backstage comedy that respects its audience and its performers, particularly Ford, who finds genuine comic timing in granite-faced contempt. It is a film of modest cultural ambition and even more modest cultural reach. We classify it, without malice, as a product of its moment: agreeable, well-mannered, and content to leave the heavier arguments to other films.