See You in the Morning (1989)

Taglines: Just when you thought it couldn’t happen again.

See You in the Morning movie synopsis. Three years after his divorce from his model-wife is the psychologist Larry Livingstone ready for a new commitment. He falls in love with the young widow Beth who has two children. But Beth and the children are still in mourning over their dead husband and father and Larry finds it a bit difficult to penetrate their reservations. Larry himself has to deal with his ex-wife and his love for his own two kids. Slowly both Beth and the children realise that they have to go on with their lives and that they have been giving a second chance.

See You in the Morning is a 1989 American romantic comedy film written and directed by Alan J. Pakula, and starring Jeff Bridges, Alice Krige and Farrah Fawcett. It features music by Nat “King” Cole and Cherri Red. The original music score was composed by Michael Small.

Film Review for See You in the Morning

”I wish you could be more forgiving to yourself,” someone says to pretty Beth Goodwin (Alice Krige), a talented photographer. Beth’s worst fault is that, though innocent, she still feels guilty for her husband’s suicide.

Larry Livingston (Jeff Bridges) is a psychiatrist and knows better, but he has something of the same hangup. After his amicable divorce from the beautiful Jo (Farrah Fawcett), he says to his ex-mother-in-law, ”I had Miss All-America in my bed and I couldn’t believe my luck.”

Larry and Beth meet cute, both suffering intense migraines at the 20th-wedding-anniversary celebration of mutual friends. They are attracted to each other but, being wounded, they fight that attraction until the moment they surrender to it. With only their children and other family members in attendance, they marry.

”See You in the Morning,” Alan J. Pakula’s new romantic comedy, is about that upscale phenomenon the movie identifies as ”musical families,” the reference being to musical chairs. The film opens today at the 57th Street Playhouse and other theaters.

Will Larry find happiness with Beth and her two adorable children, living in the handsome Manhattan town house haunted by the ghost of Beth’s dead husband? Will Beth ever forgive herself for having somehow failed her husband (David Dukes), a concert pianist made despondent by a paralyzed left hand? Will Beth’s two adorable children adapt to Larry when their mother goes to Russia on an assignment? And, for that matter, will Larry’s two adorable children adapt to Jo’s new boyfriend and her career as America’s most famous television model?

”See You in the Morning” answers these and other equally probing questions in the breezy syntax of self-help columnists, in situations designed to elicit a painless tear or two along with the occasional chuckle. Though the actors are attractive and often persuasive, and though Mr. Pakula’s screenplay has occasionally decent moments, it’s all fairly ghastly. It’s about life as lived in a series of model rooms at Bloomingdale’s.

”See You in the Morning” works in the manner of an advertising layout. It keeps telling its characters that they ”deserve” this or that new product, which, in the film’s terms, is ”happiness,” something to be acquired by trading in the old, out-of-date guilts stored in the attic.

It’s possibly the ultimate consumerist movie, not only for the prettiness of the physical environment it offers, but also for the way it manages to keep all of the truly serious emotional ugliness off the screen.

Mr. Pakula can say he wasn’t interested in making a movie about emotional ugliness. However, the manner in which he avoids dealing with one suicide, one divorce motivated by ferocious ambition and one death from natural causes suggests less that his characters are mature than that they are incredibly stupid and incurably self-absorbed.

They believe they are adult and frank, but they talk in the coy kind of euphemisms that tickle sitcom laugh tracks. ”My equipment went on strike,” says Larry to Beth when he confesses that though he went to bed with his ex-wife, they did not make love. Linda Lavin, playing the wise-cracking best friend to one and all, explains why she and her husband are childless: ”It seems his sperm count was not up to snuff.” She pauses, looking for the appropriate catch in her throat. ”We went through a lonely hell, but thank God we stuck it out.”

A self-congratulatory tone permeates the movie. You might think Miss Lavin and her husband had survived the sinking of the Titanic. Considering the fashionable phoniness of the narrative, the actors do very well. Mr. Bridges (except for a terribly twee moment when he dresses up like a statue of Eros), Miss Krige and Miss Fawcett perform with authority and skill. Even the child actors, including Drew Barrymore, are not bad. Frances Sternhagen comes on briefly as Miss Fawcett’s liberated, unshockable mother. She has heart trouble but, like everything else in the movie, it is made to appear utterly painless.