3/31/2004 01:16:00 PM|||Andrew|||First, note the newest change to my fomatting just above. I've decided to experiment with titles, at least for a little while. If I hate them, I'll ditch them directly. Heh, on that note, a whole discourse on the use of titles came into my head, but I'm not going to set that aside for later and write about what I intended to.

There are probably three basic parts to any given film: the beginning, midlde, and end. Wow, this guy's a genius you say, I could have figured that out. Well, yeah. But it's good to belabor the point, because I think that a film's overall success can be looked at as an amalgamation of these three points. To wit:

"A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct." This lovely quote, found in Frank Herbert's masterpiece of science fiction literature, Dune says a lot about how the beginning of a story is told. A beginning is important to a film because it sets the tone for the rest of the story. If the first five minutes of a movie do not engage the audience, then there's a good chance all will be lost, regardless of how good the rest of the film is. I'm trying to think of a good example but am failing to do so...I'd like to think it's because I only try to watch good films, but that's simply not the case. I screw up every once in a while. There is at least one prominent example in literature and that is (oh the blasphemy!) The Fellowship of the Ring. Now, before anyone stones me to death, I'm not saying that Fellowship is a bad book. On the contrary, it is sweetness and light through and through. Yet the first half of the book (or more accurately, Book One of The Lord of the Rings, since the saga is divided into 6 books, 2 to a volume) is dreadfully boring for many people. It's not because it's a bad book, but because (surprise!) Tolkien's interest is not entirely narrative. Simply put, he doesn't always care about advancing the story. He cares about the richness of culture, language, etc, etc. Enough. Examples of good beginnings abound in my mind for some reason. I like it when films jump right into a story: the Bond films do this well. I like the way films like Pulp Fiction and Moulin Rouge open. Speaking of Moulin Rouge, one thing that Baz Luhrman (the director) said on the DVD commentary track has stuck with me. He talked a lot about how a movie establishes a contract with the viewer, setting up guidelines for what is and is not acceptable. Perhaps this is the most important function of a beginning. It would be unwise to preface a romance with a action opener, just as it would to open an action flick with a love scene.

I'm not going to say much about middles other than that they're probably the easiest, overall, to write. The biggest issue in middles, I think, is continuity. If you consider the middle as a means of taking the audience from a certain beginning to a certain end, the most important quality of that middle part is to convincingly connect these two disparate ideas. And, I may note, if the ideas of beginning and end aren't disparate, the movie has essentially told nothing, done nothing. A typical narrative film relies most upon the movement from beginning to end, and if there is some connection there that doesn't hold up, the viewer will be lost. Avante-gard films are another matter...but I don't feel like discussing that at the moment.

On to endings! I venture forth the hypothesis that the ending of a film is the most critical part of it, by far. Yes, a bad beginning can cripple a film from the start, and a bad middle can break it in two, but a bad ending...that is the death knell for a movie. There are at least two reasons for this, I think. First, and very simply, the ending comes last. When the audience walks out of the cinema, the most salient part of the movie will be what they have seen most recently, namely the ending. So more than any other part of the movie, the ending must be good for the movie as a whole to be considered good. Second, and a little bit more deeply, the ending is the desination point for a narrative film. Not only is it chonologically last, but it is ideologically last. A narrative film moves its characters (and thus the audience) from one point to another, and so while a good foot off is important to audience engagement, far more important is where the audience is left, ideologically, by the film. Can a great ending make a movie great all by itself? In extreme cases, I don't think so...though it might make a movie much more palatable. But that a horrible ending can all by itself drive a film into the ground I am firmly convinced.

Enough theory! Let's get on to examples: polemics and praises of various films, which is what I really wanted to do all this time.

Something's Gotta Give: I honestly don't remember the beginning at all, the middle was pleasant, but the ending...well it stunk. I know this movie's been given a lot of critical acclaim, but count me as one who bucks that particular trend. The ending feels forced in a way that has become normal in Hollywood circles and perhaps that's why it's not a big deal, but I had high hopes for it throughout. Throughout the movie, Jack Nicholson's character oozes sleaze and a fierce aversion to being told what to do. He does what he wants, and he doesn't care if it hurts the woman he's had this marvelous experience with. Fine. That's his character. Up until the last five minutes of the movie I would have applauded Nancy Meyers on a job well done of making the audience alternately love and hate his character, but mostly hate it. What kills me is the storybook ending. He's just been rejected, he goes out and stands on the bridge, crying (which is precisely where I wanted the movie to end), and then she drives up, they kiss, and everything is happy. So suddenly his character is going to be all nice? And she's going to be okay with that? I don't think so. The movie's ending breaks with all that has gone before it by twisting a character that the film has set up a certain way to do something completely foreign to that character.

There are other examples of this kind of twisting. An excellent one can be seen in the comparison of Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw's masterpiece about a flower girl made into a princess by a misogynistic linguist, and My Fair Lady, the musical/film adapation of Pygmalion. I give the greatest respect to My Fair Lady for its excellent songs, but it ruined the ending for me with it's twisting of Eliza's character. In the play, Higgins does more or less what he does in the movie (minus the sentimental song), but makes clear that he won't change his character for Eliza. And Eliza walks out on him and marries Freddy. The final line by Higgins runs something along the lines of "Marry Freddy! Hahahaha!" The film, of course, twists this out of proportion, having Eliza magically decide to stay with the abusive Higgins after all because she loves him. Look, he's a misogynist and won't change. Shaw's play was a seminal feminist work. The movie teaches the idea that women should submit themselves to abusive, brutal men.

It's these kind of deus ex machina's that I simply Cannot stand.


Briefly (because I'm running out of time, I'll have to exit for class soon), there is another movie that I've seen recently that made me so delighted with its ending that I like the film more than it's probably due. It would have been so easy for 50 First Dates to end with Drew Barrymore's character somehow being cured of her disease, of Adam Sandler's character's conviction of eventual success being realized. It would have been standard Hollywood fare, cheap and overused. The movie would have lost all its sweetness to me, another in a long line of romantic comedies, with a small footnote to say that it used Groundhog Day-like effects to good comedic value. Yet the film does not end this way! It perseveres in its story, and instead of Hollywood trash, we are left with a beautiful story. A story of a woman who wakes up everyday with no memories of her past several years, and of the people around her that love her so much that they presevere through that time with her. It's a story of triumph despite adversity, rather than triumph in the sudden absence of adversity. There is no deus ex machina in this film, only a glorious realism and beauty.|||108076781562387000|||On the Endings of Films