Tomorrow Morning Review

Tomorrow Morning is a musical movie based on an Off-Broadway show with West End stars Samantha Barks and Ramin Karimloo in the lead roles.

Catherine (Barks) and Bill (Karimloo) are a couple who have been married for 10 years. However, they are about to separate and the pair reflect on the beginning of their relationship.

Before watching Tomorrow Morning, the film seemed to have a lot of positive signs. It starred two proven stage singers, and the writer of the musical, Laurence Mark Wythe, wrote the screenplay. Musically was where the film excelled. The film was blessed with two excellent singers and they sing their hearts out for the film. My favourite song in the film was “The Reasons Behind Our Impending Divorce” because the main two characters were singing and having an argument.

Sadly the praise ends there. Tomorrow Morning was a musical that didn’t work as a film. Most of the songs were reflective, they were about Catherine and Bill’s relationship and how it broke down. It broke a basic rule of screenwriting: show, don’t tell. It was like listening to songs on the radio where they tell a story about an event.  Having some songs that told of past events can be fine. A song like “Dreamed A Dream” acts as an example of this, but there wasn’t enough variety in the subject matter of Tomorrow Morning’s songs.

Tomorrow Morning had a loose narrative. It flipped from the present day to where Catherine and Bill were preparing to enter mediation regarding their divorce settlement and to 10 years prior when Catherine and Bill prepare for their wedding and Catherine found out she was pregnant. This type of story worked for films like 500 Days of Summer and Blue Valentine which showed the beginning and end of a relationship, but Tomorrow Morning didn’t match those films.

There was no sense of how Catherine and Bill’s relationship deteriorated. They went from being lovey-dovey at the beginning to them bickering during their divorce. The acting choices didn’t give a sense of real animosity between the pair. An example of this was before “The Reasons Behind Our Impending Divorce” the pair were meant to be arguing but Barks was smiling.

Tomorrow Morning served as Nick Winston’s feature film debut. He’s previously worked as a stage director and choreographer. Sadly, Tomorrow Morning was a plain looking film. There were some nice shots of the area around Tower Bridge, but the lighting was flat and it doesn’t stand up to some recent musicals like In the Heights, tick, tick… BOOM! and the recent adaptation of West Side Story.

A moment that did make me chuckle was Omid Djalili’s cameo. He makes a reference to Pretty Woman which had to be a reference to Samantha Barks’ role on the Broadway show.

As a fan of Samantha Barks, Tomorrow Morning was a disappointment. There were some solid musical performances, but the story was too slight and technically it looked like it was made on the cheap.