The movie was pedestrian. Nevertheless, Fonda brought full depth and character, and kept me fully engaged with her performance.
I agree that Matlin is a fine actress but not great.
Mister Tee wrote:Well, then, let me explain it to you.Big Magilla wrote:LOL, although I can't say calling her performance "snappy" seems like any kind of a recommendation.Reza wrote:I agree with Mister Tee. Fonda is actually very good in The Morning After.
Fonda rose up, after an undistinguished starlet decade, by being the most wised-up chick in the room. In They Shoot Horses and Klute, she took crap from nobody; if somebody tried out a line on her, she cut them off before they were halfway done. She was the first aggressive American actress of the feminist era. This quality carried over into her Lillian Hellman in Julia...though there signs she was softening a bit.
And then, with the power to direct her own career, she began casting herself, time after time, in movies where she re-enacted the process by which she had become politically radicalized. To do this, she created gauzy, unconvincing naifs who had to be "educated"; to me this is the period when she tried earnestness, and it simply didn't suit her (and even her post-transformation personae failed to match her early work). I think she was miscasting herself consistently during this period. (The only case where it worked reasonably well was in The China Syndrome, because her ignorance was pretty much limited to the subject of nuclear power; in other areas she was an earlier-era Fonda skeptic) The trend reached its nadir when she played a backwoods-woman in the TV movie The Dollmaker -- with all the condescension only a rich Hollywood liberal can provide.
Thus, for me, The Morning After represented a refreshing return to form. I don't see how anyone could call the performance earnest; she was a conniver from the get-go. And the snappiness of her line deliveries -- that Fonda cynicism that I'd loved so much a decade or more earlier -- played a large role in why I responded so much more deeply than I had to her string of pious half-political tracts.
Sadly, it was a short-lived revival. In Old Gringo she was actively terrible doing the innocent school-marm act (unfortunately burying Gregory Peck's fine late-career work in the process). After the painfully sincere Stanley and Iris, audiences had just had enough of her, and she was pushed into essential retirement. A shame.
But I celebrate this one moment when she seemed to be her old self again. Sorry so many of you don't see it my way.