| Cast: | Robert Duvall, Olga Bellin, Sudie Bond, Richard McConnell, Peter Masterson |
| Genre: | Drama/Romance |
| Director: | Joseph Anthony |
| Screenplay: | Horton Foote from William Faulkner's short story |
| Cinematography: | Allan Green |
| Composer: | Irwin Stahl |
A simple Mississippi farmer who has recently left home to oversee a saw mill for the winter excepts a lonely season of the typical perseverance and toil, but stumbles across a 3 month pregnant runaway who probably turns out to be the only love of his life. Tomorrow is one of the few romance movies that thrives on a mundane atmosphere and snail pace, the spare, sparse, and understated nature of the work rendering every simple action far more significant and substantial than it normally would be. This isn’t the typical love equals sex fantasy, but rather an attempt to show that true devotion is being glad to sign yourself up for a life of sacrifice and servitude, and not reconsidering while you are going through with it.
Jackson Fentry (Robert Duvall) seems semi-retarded at first, partially because Billy Bob Thornton adopted Robert Duvall’s single syllable monotone for in Sling Blade, but just because Jackson is a quiet and inexpressive man that doesn’t mean he isn’t perceptive and understanding. Jackson possesses no aural eloquence, but his actions speak much louder than words, and we soon realize he offers Sarah Eubanks (Olga Bellin) care, kindness, generosity, and attentiveness, in other words all she needs and has been without.
The lame point of the lawyer narrator (Horton Foote's cousin Peter Masterson) that he never imagined Jackson would have such a capacity to love is upper class condescension. The fact that there’s no one and nothing in Jackson’s life beyond the daily toil should logically expand his capacity to love rather than wither it away because he’s really had nothing to live for. To give him an actual reason to exist beyond pure survival is to open up exciting new worlds to him. His neverending tasks don’t get any easy to complete, but there are suddenly reasons to endure them.
The contrast between Jackson & Sarah’s characters is what makes the story so compelling. Jackson skips all the small talk, speaking occasionally of important matters in a very straightforward to the point manner, for instance asking “Will you be my wife?” out of the blue, though we surmise he’s been contemplating it from the moment he met her. Sarah is a sort of chatty burned out dreamer. She’s not a pie in the sky type, but rather she’s used up from her previous bad relations, so hope and imagination are all that keep her going while she’s laid up in the final months of her pregnancy. She’s also incredibly insecure from being abandoned by her family for her choice of husband, and abandoned by her husband for getting pregnant, so it’s almost as if she yammers on so Fentry won’t have the chance to do the same.
Sarah’s background is a bit sketchy. I think the difference between the two lies in the fact she’s from a less isolated part of the country, if not from the city, which would explain why her speech is far more intelligent and poetic. Not that she’s anywhere near the second coming of Shakespeare, but she’s a whimsical gabber who has clearly been exposed to more than the planting, picking, and peeling that makes up life in Jackson’s neck of the woods.
Based on a William Faulkner’s short story Tomorrow, published in the Saturday Evening Post in November 1940, the understated film goes to great lengths to evoke Faulkner’s unglamorous provincial South. Robert Duvall is dressed in tattered safety pinned clothes, but since he’s good, he doesn’t simply come across as the usual Hollywood pretty boy pretending it’s hick night at the costume ball. Meanwhile, the underlit grainy black and white cinematography evokes the feel of subsisting in the unfinished no electricity wood shack the vast majority of the film takes place in.
Though director Joseph Anthony, in a final artistic footnote to an otherwise undistinguished career, has added some cinematic touches to better convey the simplicity and squalor of the backwoods South, the film is essentially still the chamber play Horton Foote adapted for Duvall to bring to the stage. Foote & Duvall have had an excellent working relationship on stage and screen throughout the decades, including Duvall giving his first cinematic performance as Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird, but it’s this film rather than the grossly overrated Tender Mercies where the individual work of both seems to really elevate the duo. Duvall has named Tomorrow as his favorite screen role, and though one would think the top role of an actor as respected as Robert Duvall would be one any film fans must see list, Tomorrow is hardly known, much less seen. It’s the sort of austere work that might appeal to the great Carl Theodor Dreyer, striving for honesty and integrity rather than making endless concessions for the masses. Though Tomorrow might not always be spot on, there’s nothing overdone or overblown.
The problem with Tomorrow is only the portion with Jackson & Sarah works. If the movie began when he met her and ended with the funeral, it would be far more successful as everything else seems tacked on rather than explored. Told in a long flashback, a typical Faulkner framing device, we don’t learn enough from the opening to know what the trial is all about or really grasp the significance of the narrator. While the ending makes a statement about the simpleton’s unyielding ability to love, it never really touches upon the real question of how the little angel transformed into the big devil, though I suppose we are to surmise it’s from being deprived of the one who loved him. Granted, my gripe is with about maybe 10 minutes out of 103, but considering these brief moments make up the opening and closing, their muddled nature or unrealized potential, depending upon how you see them, have a far more lasting effect than the usual couple of random scenes that don’t exactly work.
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