Tune in Tomorrow Movie Review

Writers are seldom captured well on the silver screen. Either we get Gregory Peck slumming his way through F. Scott Fitzgerald's drunken escapades in Beloved Infidel or we get the agonies but not the ecstasies of The Brontë Sisters. Leave it to Peter Falk to deliver a full-blooded interpretation of a radio writer in Tune in Tomorrow, a delightful homage to the soap operas that dominated the radio air waves in 1951. This is just about the first movie I've seen that captures how much fun the interior world of a writer really is, in and of itself. Falk portrays Pedro, an insatiable eavesdropper who uses anything and everything he sees and hears as material for a wildly convoluted soap opera serial. Two of Pedro's favorite subjects are his colleague Martin and his Aunt Julia, who fall head over heels in love with each other, despite unbelievable obstacles. Pedro plays games with their lives in order to flesh out his fictional creations, but no movie with this much fondness for its characters is going to betray their aspirations by passing judgment on their weaknesses. Keanu Reeves does a credible job as Martin and his performance picks up steam as he gets more and more caught up in Pedro's tangled web and his complicated affair with his aunt by marriage. Barbara Hershey is irresistible as Aunt Julia, and her nicely textured performance does much to lend density to her young co-star's performance as well. The sequences that recreate the charm and excitement of radio drama are beautifully edited, contrasting Pedro's lavish fantasies with the ordinary men and women who help to make those fantasies real for their captive audiences. William Boyd's Tune in Tomorrow script is based on Mario Vargas Llosa's novel Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, which was in turn based on Llosa's own early marriage to his Aunt Julia. We've seen so many contemporary movies that dance skittishly around the possibilities of authentic involvement that it's a pleasure to see a film in which the characters plunge wholeheartedly into life. It's good, too, to see a mercurial love affair in which the participants are crazy out of their minds in love with each other, consequences be hanged. As directed by Jon Amiel, Tune in Tomorrow approaches nostalgia for the 1950s at a devilishly skewed angle and the results are pretty exhilarating for audiences of the 1990s, too.

1990 (PG-13) 90m/C Barbara Hershey, Keanu Reeves, Peter Falk, Bill McCutcheon, Patricia Clarkson, Peter Gallagher, Dan Hedaya, Buck Henry, Hope Lange, John Larroquette, Elizabeth McGovern, Robert Sedgwick, Henry Gibson; D: Jon Amiel; W: William Boyd; C: Robert Stevens; M: Wynton Marsalis. VHS, LV, Closed Caption