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Now that's an ending

By Sacha Molitorisz
July 19 2003

The climax to a movie can make all the difference between a screen dream and the kind of dud that leaves you longing for the credits.

In The Player, Robert Altman's brilliant satire of Hollywood, Tim Robbins plays Griffin Mill, a heartless studio executive (excuse the tautology). After beating to death a budding screenwriter, he pans the dead man's script.

"It lacked certain elements that we need to market a film successfully," says Mill.

"What elements?"

"Suspense, laughter, violence," he says. "Hope, heart, nudity, sex. Happy endings. Mainly happy endings."

Ah, endings. Hollywood executives - indeed filmmakers everywhere - are obsessed by endings. In particular, by happy endings. To find the right resolution, they commission rewrites, monitor test screenings and occasionally, as the release date looms, insist that a new ending be shot and substituted. Even celebrated works of literature are not tamper-proof: somewhere on the road from novella to script, Breakfast at Tiffany's inherited an upbeat finish.

So why the obsession? Is the ending really as important as the film industry believes? Yes. Very, very yes. It is a key ingredient to its success, both critically and commercially.

When a film resolves itself well, audiences leave satisfied and content, even if the preceding 90 minutes have been uninspiring. If, however, the climax is forced or implausible, the preceding scenes will be stripped of any poignancy. In other words: a terrific ending can make an excellent film a masterpiece; a dud ending can ruin an otherwise intriguing offering.

Consider two very different efforts by M.Night Shyamalan: The Sixth Sense and Signs. The former, starring Bruce Willis, Toni Collette and that creepy little kid with the big eyes, was a taut, dark thriller with an expertly conceived and executed twist in the tail. The latter, starring Joaquin Phoenix and our Mel, ended with a bloke in a green suit being bashed up with a baseball bat - a finale which would have been perfect had the film been titled Carry On Starman.

David Stratton, co-host of The Movie Show on SBS and a reviewer for Variety magazine, suggests a few more hits and misses. "Probably the greatest director as far as closing scenes are concerned is Billy Wilder," he says. He vividly remembers The Apartment, in which C.C. Baxter's (Jack Lemmon) declaration of love to Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) is parried with her "Shut up and deal", and Some Like It Hot, in which Jerry/Daphne (Lemmon) confesses to a suitor, Osgood, that he is a man in drag. "Well," says Osgood. "Nobody's perfect."

"Wilder has the facility for stopping a film at just the right spot," says Stratton. "Invariably he could have gone further, but he stops just when you're saying, 'Gimme more, gimme more!' That is something very few filmmakers have the balls to do, and he did it beautifully."

One of my favourite film endings belongs to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. From the outset, a bullet-ridden ending appears inevitable, but writer William Goldman (whose script won a best screenplay Oscar) and director George Roy Hill craft their tragic finale so deftly that death seems like a triumph. As the scene freezes and the sound continues, and we realise this time Paul Newman's Butch and Robert Redford's Sundance won't be making yet another of their improbable getaways, they are immortalised.

As Goldman later wrote in his book Adventures In The Screen Trade: the key to all story endings is to give the audience what it wants, but not in the way it expects.

Ken Loach agrees. "I don't go that often to the cinema," Loach told me last year in an interview to promote The Navigators, his film about Britain's privatised railways. "I tend to watch the cricket or the football, because that way I never know what's going to happen. In most films, I usually know how it will turn out before the end of the first reel. A good story should surprise you as it unfolds. Then afterwards it should seem the story could only have unfolded that way. It should have surprises, but seem inexorable ... which is a paradox."

"Everything that you write must work towards an ending," says Jan Sardi, nominated for an Oscar for co-writing Shine. "Sometimes you don't know exactly what that ending is going to be, but you must have a feeling of what conclusion you're arriving at. It's a principle that comes from Aristotle's Poetics: that the challenge for any screenwriter or dramatist is to surprise the audience with the inevitability of everything that happens. There should be only one way a story can end. The ending is written in the beginning, it should be there in the first 12 pages."

There are, of course, exceptions. Run Lola Run, for instance, was a German drama about a girl on a mission to save her boyfriend. Or rather, three missions. Raising intriguing questions about the major effect of minor events, it contained three variations of the one story. In essence, then, it was a film which challenged the whole notion of inevitable endings.

For most films, though, Sardi is right. "All the films that don't seem like the inevitable result of what's happened in the last 100 minutes, they're the least satisfying. The ones that suddenly take a departure at the end. That's because they're not plotted properly.

"I think the best films leave us with a sense of ambivalence ... that we've understood the story and that all the questions posed have in some way been answered. But in real life nothing is ever resolved like in the movies, so movies allow for ambiguities. So the best endings let you disagree - they leave you wondering. A sense of wonder is very important."

Another Aristotle fan is Robert McKee, a man who travels the world teaching people how to write scripts. His favourite film is Casablanca, largely because of its ending at the airfield, which so satisfactorily resolves each of the film's plots.

In his book Story, McKee discusses the "Key Image" of a film. That is, "a single image that sums up and concentrates all meaning and emotion. Like the coda of a symphony, the Key Image within the climactic action echoes and resonates all that has gone before. It is an image that is so tuned to the telling that when it's remembered the whole film comes back with a jolt."

Butch Cassidy managed it perfectly. So did Casablanca. Among others, McKee singles out Greed, La Dolce Vita, The Conversation, The Seventh Seal and Sling Blade as films featuring key images of a rare quality.

For McKee, the ending is so important that he doesn't speak of a climax, but a Climax, and it doesn't have to be happy. "What the audience wants is emotional satisfaction," he writes. "A climax that fulfils anticipation."

The ending of Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise - which owes an enormous debt to Butch Cassidy - fits the bill. In case you've forgotten, Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis evade the cops by driving off a cliff and plummeting to their deaths. Well, sort of. The audience never saw mangled corpses or fiery wreckage, because the action froze with the heroines in mid-air. As if they were flying. "I felt emancipated," is how a female friend of mine remembers the scene.

Apparently, the DVD features an alternative ending in which the T-bird is shown hurtling towards the floor of the Grand Canyon. Rather less triumphant. After test screenings, the film was released with the less confronting freeze-frame, which faded out to happy flashbacks.

Given the significance of endings, Hollywood's reliance on test audiences is understandable. They wield enormous power. As a result of their responses, Rupert Everett's gay character in My Best Friend's Wedding had his role expanded to include a return near the end of the film - courtesy of reshoots on a rebuilt set. In the global hit Fatal Attraction, test audiences hated Glenn Close's character with a vengeance, and caused her to be killed off.

The ending for Seven, atypically, did not succumb to the whims of test audiences. Though New Line Cinema wanted to soften the blow, Brad Pitt signed up only on condition that the script's climactic killer punch was retained. Ultimately, Seven became a standout hit. Dark, downbeat endings don't always flop.

Shortly before reaching its own dark, downbeat ending, The Player satirises the notion of test screenings. Throughout the film, Richard E. Grant's character, a wannabe auteur named Tom Oakley, has been pitching a script to Griffin Mill. Oakley is adamant: his heroine will die in the gas chamber. "No stars, no happy ending," he insists.

But when Oakley finally gets to make his film, it stars Bruce Willis and Julia Roberts and culminates in a last-second rescue. One of Oakley's collaborators is predictably outraged. "You sold it out," she shouts. "What about the truth? What about reality?"

Oakley is unmoved: "What about the way the old ending tested in Kenoga Park? Everybody hated it. We reshot it and now everybody loves it. That's reality."




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