Ostensibly similar to such films as Breezy in its middle-aged man meets free-wheeling young woman plot Ginger in the Morning emerges as a film more about the failure of a generation of men to both adjust to moral change and to meet the obligations of the values that once defined their own eroding sense of moral order. Thus, all such characters here are divorced; evidence of what the film considers to be the dwindling social compact of the ideal of American marriage. Furthermore, the men who begrudgingly admit this cannot deal with the futility it implies about their own lives and retreat into alcoholism and the search for easy sexual contact in the vain hope that they can participate in an idealized freedom they desire but ultimately cannot understand. In this world of lost men, the film holds out some hope for Markham. Thus, although director Gordon Wiles cleverly begins the film with allusions to Lolita (a cross-country journey by a lusting older man with a possible nymphette), he then proceeds to explore how this man eventually re-asserts his own moral beliefs but willingly compromises them to accommodate his love and respect for Spacek – thus, the sexual desire for young women is subsumed into a patriarchal sense of responsibility for her fate. Director Wiles clearly feels that this is both possible and responsible – the only option perhaps left a patriarchal order eroded by feminism and sexual liberation.
As such, the film is about the plight of said patriarchal responsibility in changing times. Correspondingly thus, the inherent generation gap conflict in this film is primarily in terms of an older man / younger woman relationship – one significant social / moral taboo reflecting the previous generation’s sense of proper patriarchal responsibility and sexual conduct. It is as if when shorn of such responsibility by the sexual revolution, these men retroactively seek to break the taboos of their own socialization but are unable to deal with the consequences of such indulgence and so must attempt to reconcile their actions back into their own idealized set of beliefs. Only Markham seems able to reach a compromise beyond entrapment and limbo. The portrait of the naïve innocent Spacek is framed accordingly – she is set up as a good judge of character (of men) but then slowly revealed to be perhaps too naïve in this. Thus, she is not the be-all and end-all wise-hippie but a cathartic presence who is humanized rather than eroticized the more Markham discovers about her personality and her naiveté. As the innocent philosopher of the peace-and-love ethos Spacek is thus found also wanting – needing the patriarchal support of the very people her easy approach to sexuality would both offend and seduce. The need for connection underlies the search for sexual freedom in this sadly neglected comedy-drama. read more