MOVIE REVIEW : Marital Ebb and Flow Feels Fake in ‘Morning’

Anyone who has been anywhere near the meltdown of a divorce and the optimistic fusion of remarriage will recognize that “See You in the Morning” (citywide) comes from a veteran of those campaigns. Writer-director Alan Pakula has given interviews explaining how close this material is to him, to his heart and to his own knowledge.

Mysteriously, with this weight of experience behind him and in spite of fine work he has gotten from his cast, in particular Jeff Bridges, Frances Sternhagen, Alice Krige and Lukas Haas, Pakula has come up with the most real-looking fake movie imaginable.

Even when situations have an ominously true ring to them, like the fatal moment when Jeff Bridges’ super-model wife, Farrah Fawcett, pronounces those stomach-churning words, “We need to have a talk,” the aura of the Hollywood Movie is everywhere.

First, there is casting. Good as he is at every nuance of fatherhood and stepfatherhood, persuasive as Bridges has been as everything from an alien to a Santa Barbara wastrel, can you believe Jeff Bridges as a psychiatrist? Therapist maybe. Radio talk-show shrink, absolutely. Psychiatrist, nah.

What about Bridges’ character? Having been unwillingly wrenched away from his own two young children, this latter-day saint cheerfully takes on a pair of step-children who idealize their dead father, a dog who still dotes on his dead master and a house put together for another husband.

Bridges even has goodness left over, enough to encourage his new wife to go to the Soviet Union within a month of their marriage to further her fledgling career as a photographer. And when his repressed and certainly understandable feelings finally do surface, there’s not even an explosion, only the most civilized one-night drinking jag. Not even a hangover.

Finally, having been tempted by his certainly tempting ex-wife during a moment when she feels especially vulnerable, he goes home to his second wife to bare all. Setting aside the potential hostility in that bit of sharing, is Rome calling right now, to arrange the time for his canonization?

Mostly, Pakula has left nothing unsaid. Or rehashed. Certainly he has condensed nothing. Think of the flashes of insight that lit up “Petulia,” cryptic words, inflections, arrangements that revealed every painful twist to life as a weekend parent. Somehow, in dealing with deeply personal material, Pakula, a usually inventive director, has become bogged down in flat-footed literalness, as though to savor the Angst a detail at a time.

There isn’t even real Angst , except among the sad little kids from Bridges’ first marriage, the PG-13-rated movie’s real victims. Bridges’ second wife, Krige, is a photographer whose pianist-husband has killed himself when a muscle weakness recurs, signaling the end of his concert career. (He leaves behind a note suggesting hollowly that he could of course write movie music, but apparently death is preferable. Really?)

As Krige shares the immediate news of her husband’s death with best friend Linda Lavin (in a role that redefines thankless), Krige’s 10-year-old daughter (Drew Barrymore) and 8-year-old son (Lukas Haas) come home from school. Krige doesn’t give a single indication that their father has just died. Even given this wife’s mote of perfectionism, her virtuosity at self-blame, this seems so unreal as to be downright eerie.

But it seems to escape Pakula’s notice, along with other peculiarities. What, for example, are we to make of his frolicsome opening sequence? The laughing Bridges-Fawcett family is playing a game with their very young children on their grandmother’s island: Whose empty liquor bottle, thrown into these pristine waters, will win the race downstream? Has everyone taken leave of common sense? Are we to accept this giving, sharing, caring, toothsome family as . . . polluters?

‘SEE YOU IN THE MORNING’

A Lorimar Film Entertainment presentation of an Alan J. Pakula film. Producer Pakula, Susan Solt. Associate producer Judith Stevens. Director, writer Pakula. Camera Donald McAlpine. Production design George Jenkins. Editor Evan Lottman. Costumes John Boxer. Music Michael Small. Sound Arthur Bloom. With Jeff Bridges, Alice Krige, Farrah Fawcett, Lukas Haas, Drew Barrymore, Frances Sternhagen, George Hearn, Theodore Bikel, Linda Lavin.

Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes.

MPAA-rated: PG-13 (parents strongly cautioned; some material may be inappropriate for children under 13).