God of Cinema, End My Film!

Remember the good old days, when filmmakers knew when and how to end their movies? Now, it's true that for every brilliant Billy Wilder last line ("I'm ready for my closeup," and "Nobody's perfect" being only the most memorable), there were some messy Hollywood endings. One thinks of stories of Francis Coppola shooting three different endings for Apocalypse Now and settling on one only hours before the premiere. And there is, of course, a long and dishonorable tradition of tacking on happy endings that reaches from Murnau's Last Laugh through the complete trashing of Malamud's work in the ending of The Natural. (Let's not even get into what Demi did to Hawthorne). Lately, however, the inability of even our best directors to bring their films to a timely and interesting conclusion seems to be a disturbing trend. I am not saying that every "Hollywood" ending need be, to quote Wilder again, tied up with tissue paper with pink ribbons on it. In fact, nothing makes me happier than a film without simple closure that encourages the audience to speculate on its possible implications; Darren Aronofsky's viciously underrated The Fountain leaps to mind. In fact, just the opposite seems to be happening. Directors appear to have lost their trust in both their audience and in their own ability to see their vision clearly through to the end. Could you imagine if they remade The Birds today? Gone would be Hitchcock's brilliant and disturbing anti-ending, replaced with an epic CGI battle culminating in sprawling avian carnage and some macho wisecracks from Will Smith. What's going on here?

The perfect example from the fall season's films is Scorsese's piece of Oscar-bait, The Departed. Scorsese is a director who, in the past, has been a model of exactly the kind of morally ambiguous ending that challenges the audience in the best possible way. Think of Travis Bickle's elevation to glory at the end of Taxi Driver, or Rupert Pupkin's showbiz triumph at the end of King of Comedy, or especially Henry Hill's escape from the consequences of his actions by ratting out his old friends at the end of Goodfellas. In these endings, Scorsese holds the mirror up to us and leaves us with queasy feelings about the ethical shortcomings we have as individuals and as a society. Ironically, in The Departed, he seems to be setting us up for another such classic finale. (SPOILER ALERT). After Matt Damon's character kills Jack Nicholson's mob boss, Scorsese cuts to Damon walking into the squad room the next morning. There he is met by the wild applause of his colleagues; he is the man of the hour, the man who confronted and destroyed the indestructible evil. He smiles weakly, the rat magically tranformed into the hero. Perfect, right? End the movie right there, right? No--Scorsese then proceeds to go all Return of the King on us (or Casino Royale?) and give us another 45 minutes, and every time we think the film is over, it just keeps on going. Finally, after the last brutal killing, Scorsese rewards us for our time spent with what is possibly the single worst closing shot in a film by a major American filmmaker. We see a rat crawling on the railing of the balcony, while in the background, a golden dome shines. Get it? Get it? It's a metaphor, see. I mean, a film about police and Mob "rats" and the last image is of an actual rat? Thanks, Marty--I would never have gotten your point without that little extra bit of help. Calling the ending sophomoric would be an insult to all right-thinking 10th graders everywhere, and one gets the sneaking suspicion that if one of Scorsese's NYU film students had shot something like that, the master would probably have gone all Jake LaMotta on him or her. Why have we lost your trust in us?

Compare that to the conclusion of my favorite film of the year, Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers. The film opens with Ryan Philippe's character, Doc Bradley, in a foxhole with Jamie Bell's Iggy, the mascot of the group. Doc crawls out to help a wounded soldier, but when he returns, Iggy is nowhere to be found. The film then jumps back and forth in time, as we see the troops training for Iwo Jima, fragments of the battle itself, the truth about the famous picture and, most intriguingly, the different reactions of the three surviving soldiers in the picture as they are swept across America on a whirlwind publicity tour. Only in the end do we see what became of Iggy; in Doc's absence, he had fallen into one of the many caves the Japanese had dug to defend the island, and was apparently tortured in some fairly appalling ways. When the platoon stumbles upon the caves and Iggy's corpse, Eastwood's camera is behind the body looking out at the mouth of the cave and the horrified reactions on the soldiers' faces. One of them says something like, "Oh my God, can you believe what they did to him?" as the camera appears to be ready to do a slo-mo 360 and show us what happened. At which point, Eastwood simply cuts away to the next scene, knowing full well that any gory Hollywood makeup job could never compare with what we could come up with in our imagination. Compared with Scorsese's childishly obvious denoument, Eastwood's model restraint reminds us of a time when directors did not connect all the dots for us, and insisted that we be engaged in their films as thoughtful, active viewers.

I am not saying that an elliptical or open ending is inherently better than one with clear narrative and moral closure. One is glad, for example, that someone was able to talk Orson Welles out of ending Citizen Kane with Thompson's line about one word being inadequate to sum up a man's life, and without giving the audience the gift of Rosebud. And who doesn't love an ending like the finale of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where the characters, now literally immortal, ride off into the sunset? And this from Spielberg, the man who blew one of the best closing shots ever (Tom Hanks' dead stare at the end of Saving Private Ryan) by tacking on an awful epilogue, like we'd miss the point. But these days, it seems as though we're stuck in some kind of causality loop: they don't trust us, so they make dumber pictures, which makes us dumber, which makes them dumb down their work even further, and so on. And this lack of knowing when or how to finish leads us to a new Bond film that's a full hour longer than Doctor No, a King Kong that's literally twice as long and half as good as the original, and our old friend Spielberg turning his back on his own perfect ending and making a fourth Indiana Jones picture. To the Scorseses and Peter Jacksons of the world, I would simply quote the last line of Wilder's The Apartment: shut up and deal.