LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Alan J. Pakula: Films
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ALICE KRIGE LOOKS NOTHING like Beth Goodwin, her character in Alan J. Pakula's See You in the Morning. At a luncheon with eightor nine film critics, she arrives wearing no makeup and comfortably dressed in a loosely fitting, plain gray dress. The only jewelry she wears is a discreet gold wedding ring -- no earrings or necklaces -- and her wavy hair flows down toward her waist.
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Although he has remained active in recent years, Pakula has not produced—with one exception—work of real significance since Sophie's Choice (itself more of an actors' than director's film). See You in the Morning attempts to recycle the melodramatic poignancy of Klute and The Sterile Cuckoo, but does not rediscover the stylistic finesse that made these earlier films so successful. See You in the Morning's examination of family and personal breakdown is heavy-handed and hence strangely unaffecting.
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Pakula came to directing comparatively late. The son of an immigrant Polish Jew, he was expected to take over the family printing business after attending Yale, but instead talked his father into underwriting a Hollywood sojourn. By 1957, Pakula was producing Fear Strikes Out (about baseball player Jimmy Piersall, pushed into madness by his demanding father), the first of seven films with director Robert Mulligan. The duo's high point was 1962's To Kill a Mockingbird (which won Gregory Peck an Oscar as godlike dad Atticus Finch), but Pakula later admitted to being depressed whenever filming started and the producer had to leave the set. With 1969's The Sterile Cuckoo, he finally, at 40, stepped behind the camera, beginning a career remarkable for its gently persistent probing into the ties that bind families and strangers alike. Pakula once considered becoming a psychoanalyst.
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It's curious, because the audio track by Pakula is of rather poor audio quality. It's not as if he is talking about the movie on a track laid over the movie later; it's like he's talking over a television broadcast of the film, with the volume knob up too high. In a calm, almost flat voice, Pakula gives the background of the film and his philosophy about constructing scenes and framing them. Interestingly, he seems to have some reservations about MacNichol, but in the spirit of arsekissing commentary tracks apparently going back to the '80s, he doesn't sustain the spirit of frankness. The hour long documentary is not dated, but is copyrighted to Pioneer, so it must be off that laserdisc (and it has Pakula in it). Streep, Styron, and some Holocaust experts talk about the importance of the film and the meaning of the reality it touches on. If you don't like the film it won't convince you; if you do like it, it's preaching to the converted.
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"For me, Alan Pakula was one of the great American filmmakers, but if you look at his films, they look so simple. The camera is not doing back—flips and he's not afraid to hold a shot. You can argue that if you do your work really well, no one should notice."
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