Come Early Morning (2006)

I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that the title of Joey Lauren Adams' directorial debut refers to Ashley Judd's character waking up in a motel room after a drunken one night stand, attempting to get the hell out of there before she dares wake up the oaf lying under the sheets. If so, that's pretty cool, I guess, except there's not much in the movie that explains such situations, unless you're willing to go into the Freudian aspect of it and say her distant relationship with her alcoholic father is the reason why she gets drunk and sleeps with every guy in the bar she frequents....but I'm rambling already.

I've seen this movie before. In fact, I saw it in a theater a month or two ago, when it was called "Sherrybaby", had less sex, more nudity, substituted the alcohol for drugs, and had a similarly depressing/where-do-I-go-from-here? ending. Not to say that those were better plot devices, but the movie did have actors who demanded screen presence (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Danny Trejo, Giancarlo Esposito), even though the story was cliched.

Ashley Judd can act, as far as I know, but this movie won't let her. Most conversations between her and other characters are filmed with shots cutting back and forth after each sentence, letting us glimpse a facial expression or two and nothing more.

"Come Early Morning", unsurprisingly, adds nothing to the female one-crappy-thing-after-another genre. Judd puts on jeans, goes to church, steals a jukebox, eats frog legs, and little more. The only interesting thing remaining about such movies is to watch the lead actress experience some sort of sexual awakening or transformation. In this case, it's when Judd's sober, and the camera lingers as her lover begins to teach her that sex is something meaningful, or even holy. But the scene ends abruptly, as it leaves Judd and the audience--as the now-apparent double meaning of the title implies-- with no opportunity to "Come".

Grade: C-