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Morning Light

by Lindy West

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Morning Light
dir. Mark Monroe and Paul Crowder

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I have sentimental love for the filmmakers at the Walt Disney Company—Enchanted, everything Pixar, "I use antlers in all of my dec-o-raaaating!"—but rigorous documentarians they are not. Morning Light, a dumb vanity project from aging sailboat enthusiast Roy Disney, is a bland bundle of innocuously fabricated truth: Roy Disney buys fancy sailboat. Roy Disney recruits attractive Young People™ to pilot said boat. Young People™ recite scripted monologues about sailing over pretty sailing montages. Sailboat enters famous sailboat race. After much Togetherness™ and Lesson-Learning-At-Sea™, Young People™ almost win. Young People™'s lives will never be the same.

Your life, on the other hand, will be exactly the same whether you see Morning Light or not.

Even with the prefab setup, it could have been an interesting little something, had the filmmakers just kept the cameras rolling and filmed the words and movements of their subjects—i.e., made an actual documentary. Instead, it's just a bunch of nothing: dolphins, shooting stars (fake!), and infinite iterations of "It's really about the journey."

There are a few genuine moments in Morning Light, and they stick out like, um, some sort of bright and shiny sailboating analogy. Just watching people do their jobs efficiently—pull this rope, turn that crank, shinny up the mast—is incredibly satisfying. And, far too rarely, a candid comment from one of the kids makes it through, either funny ("Nothing's this far from land—this is just stupid") or revealing, like the tacitly accepted boys' club attitude directed at Morning Light's sole female crewmember: "You're drunk on estrogen." "You need to use your big-girl voice." Ouch. Now, yucky gender politics among attractive nautical Young People™—that might be worth making a movie about. Oh... no? Just a chuckle and a wink and then we return to our regularly scheduled inspirational pap? Whatever you say, Roy Disney.