Home \ Signature Roles \ The Morning After (1986) — Jane Fonda
JANE FONDA · 1986 · SIGNATURE ROLES
Alex Sternbergen wakes up in The Morning After with a hangover, a stranger’s apartment, and a dead man beside her. She does not remember how she got there, and she is not sure whether she killed him. That opening, played by Jane Fonda as a mixture of panic, black humour, and exhausted self-knowledge, sets the tone for a film that is part thriller, part character study, and part portrait of a woman trying to outrun her own reputation. Alex is a former actress whose career has stalled, whose drinking has taken over, and whose life has narrowed to a series of mornings after. Fonda plays her without asking the audience to forgive her, and without asking them to judge her either. She asks them, instead, to watch her think.
The film, directed by Sidney Lumet, is a neo-noir set in Los Angeles, a city that in Lumet’s hands is both glamorous and unforgiving. Alex, having fled the scene of the murder, meets Turner Kendall, played by Jeff Bridges, a former policeman who is now working as a kind of fixer and who becomes, reluctantly, her ally. Together they try to work out what happened the night before, who the dead man was, and why Alex was there. The plot has the usual noir machinery — a jealous husband, a missing witness, a police investigation closing in — but Lumet is less interested in the machinery than in the woman caught in it. The mystery is not only who killed the man. It is whether Alex can trust her own memory, and whether she can trust Turner, and whether she can trust herself to stay sober long enough to find out.
Fonda’s performance is built around that distrust. Alex is funny in a way that is not quite a defence and not quite a confession. She makes jokes about her drinking, about her failed career, about the men in her life, and the jokes land because Fonda delivers them with a weariness that suggests she has made them before, to herself, in worse circumstances. When Alex is sober, she is sharp, observant, and capable of real tenderness. When she is drinking, she is reckless, charming, and dangerous to herself. Fonda does not draw a neat line between those two versions. She shows how quickly one can become the other, and how much effort it takes for Alex to stay on the right side of that line for even a day.
That effort is the film’s emotional centre. Alex is not a woman who has hit rock bottom once and then recovered. She is a woman who hits a smaller bottom every morning, and who has learned to function in the space between a drink and a decision. Fonda, who was in her late forties when she made the film, brings a physical honesty to that state: the way Alex moves in the morning, the way she holds a glass, the way she tries to look presentable for a meeting she is not ready for. There is no glamour in it, and Fonda does not seek any. She lets Alex look tired, because Alex is tired, and she lets the audience see that tiredness as a form of truth rather than as a flaw to be fixed by the plot.
Turner, as played by Bridges, is an important counterweight. He is not a traditional romantic hero, and he does not rescue Alex in the conventional sense. He is a man with his own past, his own compromises, and his own reasons for helping a stranger. Their relationship develops through shared work — checking alibis, visiting bars, talking to people who knew the dead man — rather than through declarations. Fonda and Bridges play those scenes with a restraint that makes their growing trust believable. They do not fall in love in a montage. They learn, slowly, that the other person is not lying to them, which, for Alex, is a more radical discovery than romance.
Lumet’s direction supports that restraint. He films Los Angeles not as a postcard, but as a series of interiors and early-morning streets: apartments that are too bright, bars that are too dark, police stations that are too clean. The camera stays close to Alex, often following her from behind, as if the audience is trying to keep up with her. That closeness means Fonda cannot hide behind plot. She has to carry scenes in which very little happens except Alex thinking, and she does, with a face that is constantly registering small decisions: to tell the truth, to lie, to drink, not to drink, to run, to stay.
The film was not a major commercial success, and it is often overlooked in surveys of Fonda’s career, which tend to focus on the 1970s triumphs and the later Grace and Frankie revival. That overlooking is a mistake, because The Morning After shows Fonda doing something she had rarely been allowed to do: playing a woman whose talent is in the past, whose present is messy, and whose future is uncertain, without turning her into a cautionary tale. Alex is not punished for her drinking by the narrative, and she is not rewarded for stopping by a neat ending. She is allowed to be complicated, and Fonda’s Oscar nomination for Best Actress — her seventh, and, as it turned out, her last for many years — recognised that complexity.
There is also a meta-textual layer that is worth noting without overstating it. Alex is an actress, and Fonda is an actress playing an actress whose career has faded. The film does not make a simple point about Hollywood ageism, but it does not need to. Every scene in which Alex is dismissed, underestimated, or treated as a former star rather than a current person carries a quiet resonance for anyone who knows Fonda’s own career, in which she had repeatedly reinvented herself rather than accepting the roles Hollywood offered women of her age. Alex’s struggle to be taken seriously as a witness is, in a smaller way, a struggle to be taken seriously as a person, and Fonda plays it with the authority of someone who understands that struggle from the inside.
What makes Alex Sternbergen a signature role, then, is not that she is likeable, or triumphant, or even, in the end, fully redeemed. It is that she is recognisably human in a genre that often reduces women to victims or femmes fatales. Alex is neither. She is a woman who wakes up in a bad situation, makes bad decisions, makes better ones, and, by the end, begins to tell the truth about herself, not because the plot requires it, but because she is tired of lying. Fonda plays that beginning — not a full transformation, but a beginning — with a clarity that stays with the viewer after the mystery is solved.
For Past Tunes readers, The Morning After is a valuable bridge between Fonda’s 1970s peak and her later work. It shows her in the mid-1980s, still taking risks, still choosing roles that did not flatter her, and still trusting that an audience would follow a difficult woman through a difficult story. Alex Sternbergen may not be the role most people name first when they think of Jane Fonda, but she is one of the roles that best shows why Fonda lasted: she was willing to play a morning after, not just a triumph, and to find, in that morning, a woman worth watching.