I went to see Morning Glory on Friday with a group of female journalist friends, including Shani Hilton and Latoya Peterson. I think we expected it to be a guilty pleasure, a lot of Rachel McAdams being adorable, Patrick Wilson being delicious, and Harrison Ford being grumpy, and of course it was all of those things. But we found ourselves howling in the theater; I can't remember the last time I've laughed so hard. It's one of the truer movies I've seen about the practice of journalism, particularly the daily grind of non-investigative journalism (which normally gets the most screen time). And it's a delightfully non-punitive movie about a woman who loves her work.
A number of the critiques of Morning Glory have compared the movie unfavorably to Network. That leap makes a certain amount of sense: they're both about the news business. But I think Morning Glory is just weird and sincere enough, and just fluffy (folks who have seen the movie will get the joke) enough, that its true predecessor is Soapdish, the terrific 1991 movie about life on a soap opera set that starred a cast even more ridiculously accomplished than Morning Glory's: Sally Field, Kevin Klein, Whoopi Goldberg, Robert Downey Jr. before the drugs, Elisabeth Shue, a young Terri Hatcher.
Both shows are just a little bit over the line. Morning Glory has an escalating serious jokes about the gimmicks McAdams' producer subjects her weather man to, while Soapdish is based around the soaps come to life. Soapdish is probably the better movie if only because Morning Glory would have benefitted from embracing its weirdness a bit more. High emotional keys stick out less in melodrama.
But Morning Glory's real strength is that it's a romantic comedy that could have cut out its romance entirely and still have been a successful, entirely engaging movie. For once, the main character's passion for her work is a genuine, consuming, fully-developed passion. And as a result, it's much easy to see how her love interest finds her interesting and how they have real problems—even if he's not that interesting himself.