COMMENTARY
Some movie endings are just plain wrong
By Jami Bernard
Knight Ridder News Service
Movies have happy endings (the hero finds true love or a suitcase stuffed with cash) and unhappy endings (the hero dies in the course of doing something valiant). There are also endings that are just plain wrong because nothing in the film supports the conclusion. These endings cheat audiences.
Several recent films — "Bad Santa," "The Last Samurai" and "Something's Gotta Give" among them — have flagrantly wrong endings. (Warning: This column is chock-full of spoilers.)
In "Bad Santa," Billy Bob Thornton plays a drunken, womanizing, child-hating burglar who moonlights as Santa Claus so he can case department stores for future break-ins. The funniest moment is when the cops shoot him in the back as he is trying to be nice to a kid for once. A hail of bullets cuts him down as he crawls along in his Santa suit, outstretched hand holding a cuddly toy.
This Santa is so bad it is fitting he should die, despite his change of heart.
Instead the movie cuts to a happy ending with Santa's voice-over reassuring us that he survived the "Butch Cassidy"-like gunfire. The movie thus pretends to have a "happy" ending, even though this Santa is far from reformed.
In "The Last Samurai," Tom Cruise plays a burned-out American military adviser who embraces the samurai code of honor, even though that way of life is about to hit the historical dustbin. He and his newfound samurai pal (Ken Watanabe) wind up as the only survivors on a battlefield.
In the Japanese tradition, there is nobility in failure, and the samurai does the correct thing under the circumstances — he commits seppuku, the ritual (and honorable) act of suicide. But Cruise's character seems to forget the samurai values he so recently embraced. He walks off the battlefield unscathed. Buh-bye, samurai code!
Audiences may not want to see America's No. 1 box-office star kill himself, but the character's arc would be better served by a noble suicide after a life lived in guilt and misery.
"Something's Gotta Give" sets itself up as a bracing antidote to movies in which an older guy gets the younger babe. Here it's a middle-aged divorcee (Diane Keaton) who is the protagonist, and she has a choice of two suitors: a lecherous Jack Nicholson or a respectful Keanu Reeves.
If this movie really wanted to turn things upside down, it would end with Keaton in the arms of the younger man, not running at the last minute into the arms of the ambivalent Nicholson.
Wrong endings aren't new. Orson Welles was scouting locations in Brazil when RKO radically altered his "The Magnificent Ambersons." The studio asked editor Robert Wise to oversee 50 minutes of trims and reshoot an optimistic ending in which the spoiled scion of the doomed Amberson family is pressed to the bosom of the more successful family across the street.
Even directors sometimes agree it is better to give audiences what they want than to risk upsetting them. Adrian Lyne shot an implausible new ending for "Fatal Attraction" when test audiences said they weren't satisfied with the Glenn Close character committing suicide.
Instead, she is drowned in a bathtub, then shot for good measure. Audiences loved this ending, but the whole movie had pointed to suicide as a natural conclusion, especially since it would have implicated the adulterous Michael Douglas character, whose fingerprints were on the knife.
In recent years, the wrong ending of "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" is the one that has rankled most. The film was jointly developed by the pessimistic Stanley Kubrick and the sunnier Steven Spielberg. Kubrick died and Spielberg directed.
Surely Kubrick would have concluded it at the moment when the robot boy is stuck at the bottom of the ocean, praying for eternity to a faded wooden saint that's a remnant from an amusement park. With all its shudderingly tragic implications, that would have been a worthier ending than Spielberg's more poignant one.
Where filmmakers or the nervous studios behind them often err is in imposing inappropriate crowd-pleasing endings on movies, subverting some of the pleasures they offer.
