SIFF Review: Seattle's own Morning

A White Tank Top Movie Review

The rapidity with which we become acquainted with Andrew Ramaglia’s stomach bile and mucus is a sign of things to come in Joe Mitacek’s Morning.

Ramaglia plays Mike Hade (one letter away from hell!), a man for whom rolling out of a pickup and vomiting seems like regular occurrence. These escapades would be more charming if he didn’t have a wife, Sara (Emily Cline) and a two-year-old son, Jack (P.J. Caniff) at home.

But since this is film shot in Seattle, my focus was: where is he throwing up? Is that Ballard pavement? 

Read the full review after the jump.

It was a great comfort when Mike went to drink at The Sloop. Mitacek, a native, also gets just right the percentage of male Seattleites who have beards, the Rainier suds glistening in their mustaches. And we could all commiserate when Sara’s friend says, “it felt like I hadn’t seen the sun in months.”

Mike, an itinerant fisherman who looks and behaves like a caveman, makes an odd mate for Sara, a stressed-out young mom trying to become a registered nurse (I was worried about how much she was paying for parking when she went to study Gray’s Anatomy at the Central Library). Their son is adorable but they mostly punt him back and forth, absorbed as they are in their own tasks. All this foreshadows Jack’s death by drowning when left unattended in a bathtub. 

The rest of Morning deals with the aftermath. But the question is not “Will Mike and Sara stick together?” — it is “Why were they ever together in the first place?” 

Mike lamely tries to shift the blame for the accident. Sure, he was passed out drunk on the couch, but if Sara hadn’t been out flirting with an old flame, she could have stopped it. Wallowing in alcoholic self-pity, he is decidedly unsympathetic. In the Q&A, the brave Ramaglia called playing a character as irredeemably fucked up as Mike “an attractive challenge.”

Aside from the kinetic scene of chaos when the parents try to revive their dead son, the film is slow moving. Mitacek composed it with an incredible preponderance of close ups, with hairlines on the top of the screen and chins at bottom. Fully two thirds of the scenes are shot this way and the camera usually moves away from the person speaking, so we see someone listening or the back of the speaker’s head. This technique reduces the effect of the dialogue, which is generic at best (Mitacek works as an editor in Los Angeles and the film shows that is his emphasis).

Mitacek said that using 16mm film was aesthetically important to him and I applaud his choice. Synopses of Morning describe it as a dark film and that’s accurate on a literal and metaphorical level. The characters live in grainy half-light — Mike seems to be permanently squinting and Sara’s dark-ringed eyes and pale face make an unromantic mask of despair. I still don’t know exactly what Ramaglia and Cline look like even though they were on stage after the screening — the Harvard Exit does not believe in lifting house lights all the way.

As Mike tries to anchor himself to his wife, he channels Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (shouting “Saraaaaaaaaaa!” outside her window) and Homer in The Simpsons (pulling out the “no one will ever need you as much as I do” card). Thankfully none of it works — it’s a relief that they won’t go on torturing each other. After living with the film for three years, Mitacek said he “underestimated the weight” of his story — Morning is as heavy as it gets.

There was some bristling when someone in the audience asked whether the film needed more “rays of light” or a happier ending.  Mitacek was justified in replying that he simply wanted to present truthfully a period in a character’s life, but I think it’s fair to press the issue. The film is cycles of Mike going on benders, Sara looking to friends/lovers for comfort and then dealing with the depressing fallout. Morning would have benefited from more variables in storyline to match the powerful acting and the grim beauty of the cinematography.

Still, kudos to Mitacek — it’s a huge undertaking to write, edit, direct and produce a film (and to have the restraint to not star in it). He said he did out of a “desperate desire to make a movie,” and that’s the reason SIFF is here.