Tune in Tomorrow Is Engaging Fluff Undermined by Keanu Reeves' Horrifying Attempt at a New Orleans Accent
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Considering the nature of my career it’s appropriate that the movie that changed my life and made me want to devote my life and career to film wasn’t a lofty all-time classic like Citizen Kane, Breathless or The Godfather.
Those are all fine films but inarguably the single most important and influential movie I’ve ever seen was a glorious goof about a pair of dumbasses who travel merrily through history in a phone booth acquiring knowledge.
When I was thirteen years old I was beyond miserable. My life was sad and lonely and largely without direction or hope. My only escape was the movies. I will consequently never forget the glorious day back in 1989 when I stole enough money to buy a pair of matinee tickets to Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
As I recount in my 2009 memoir The Big Rewind, when the lights went down and the movie went up I had an epiphany. Anything that could make tragic souls like myself forget the inexorable pain of existence had to be a force for good in the universe.
I decided to devote my life to movies. That was the beginning of my crazy, larger-than-life journey from rags to riches and then back to rags again.
Keanu Reeves consequently figures prominently in my origin story. He was there at the very beginning, alongside partner in time travel and world-saving Alex Winter.
I’ve gone on quite a journey with Reeves over the subsequent three and a half decades. Along with the rest of the culture I went from glibly and unfairly dismissing the actor as a hopeless lightweight painfully miscast as anything other than an agreeable goof to respecting and admiring him as an actor, an icon, a movie star, an action hero and human being.
Just about everyone loves Reeves. There’s nothing not to love about him. He’s handsome, hard-working, charming, talented and famously generous and kind to his costars and crew. Also, he’s not on social media, which speaks well of his priorities and judgment.
Reeves changed film forever with The Matrix and, to a much lesser extent, its sequels and proved himself all over again as a Clint Eastwood-style badass in the John Wick franchise.
The Speed and Point Blank star is so beloved that I feel vaguely guilty writing anything even remotely critical of him. I don’t want to come off like Matthew Perry, who made the unconscionable mistake of jokingly asking why people like Chris Farley and River Phoenix had to die while Reeves remained tragically alive in his memoir and had to apologize publicly and profusely for misreading the cultural moment so egregiously. He’s even having those references scrubbed from future editions of the book.
It’s not enough. I will continue to make ironically wishing for Perry’s death a running joke here at the Happy Place until I get bored and move onto something even sillier and more self-indulgent.
So it brings me no joy to have to grudgingly concede that Reeves is hopelessly miscast and overwhelmed in the 1991 comedy Tune in Tomorrow.
Jon Amiel’s airy adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter casts a baby-faced Reeves as Martin Loader, a law student and twenty-one year old employee of radio station WXBU.
WXBU, tragically, is a New Orleans radio station, which means that Reeves spends the entire film wrestling heroically if unsuccessfully with a very thick, wildly unconvincing New Orleans drawl.
Reeves has many wonderful qualities as an actor and a man. A facility with accents and dialects are unfortunately and famously not one of them. Remember how distracting Reeves’ British accent was in Bram Stoker’s Dracula? Reeves’ N’Awlins accent is every bit as distracting and unfortunate.
Tune in Tomorrow makes the mistake of giving Reeves an accent AND stranding this most contemporary of movie stars back in the old days of 1950s. The film finally fails Reeves by casting him as a macho, aggressive go-getter rather than a beatific soul.
In Tune in Tomorrow, Martin has a steady girl that he casts aside in order to pursue a semi-taboo relationship with Julia (Barbara Hershey), his thirty-six year old aunt by marriage.
Julia is beautiful but more than anything she’s worldly. She’s lived and loved and married and divorced and learned some things in her meandering about this planet. Martin isn’t intimated by the 15 year age gap between him and his object of desire or the fact that she used to be married to his uncle.
Hershey’s dry-witted survivor is flattered by the younger man’s dogged interest but dismisses him as a lightweight kid out of his league. The aggressive young man eventually manages to bulldoze his way past his semi-relation’s defenses and the two have a fling.
Peter Falk gleefully devours scenery in the impossibly flashy role of Pedro Carmichael. Falk’s eccentric wordsmith is a master of a very peculiar medium: live radio melodrama. WXBU hires the crazed scribe to write its wildly popular drama Kings of the Garden District.
Seemingly all of New Orleans is addicted to the impossibly melodramatic twists and turns of Kings of the Garden District. Sometimes we see radio performers decades older than the characters they’re playing perform Carmichael’s words on the radio and sometimes the script-writer’s crazed vignettes are acted out by a gaggle of big name guest stars like Peter Gallagher, Dan Hedaya, Buck Henry, Elizabeth McGovern and John Laroquette.
Tune in Tomorrow reminded me a lot of another recent Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 entry, the little-loved John Candy vehicle Delirious. Both films set out to take the piss out of something no one in the world has ever taken seriously: the preposterous twists and turns of the soap opera world.
Amiel’s retro romance has great fun exaggerating something that is already almost impossibly extreme in its violent disregard for plausibility and realistic human behavior.
When Falk’s twinkly-eyed schemer learns of his handsome coworker’s transgressive fling he is titillated as well as inspired. The larger than life radio writer, who is less a garden variety eccentric than some manner of trickster-god, acts as a matchmaker for Julia and Martin for the sake of his art more than their happiness.
looking good!
Like Delirious, Tune in Tomorrow is terribly slight, a wisp of a movie that aspires to do nothing beyond distract audience from life’s hellishness for 96 lightweight minutes. That slightness is at once one of the film’s great strengths and a glaring weakness.
Amiel and screenwriter William Boyd never find a consistent tone for the proceedings, which lurches between romance, broad comedy, slapstick and parody.
The result is breezy and pleasurable even as the film flies off the rails in the third act when it should be swooping in for a smooth landing. Reeves is appealing if miscast but his chemistry with Hershey leaves much to be desired and the unlikely couple is never anywhere near as compelling as Falk’s kooky writer.
Tune in Tomorrow is an agreeable enough time waster but it has the potential to be so much more.
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