Savviest Filmmakers Put Last Things First

Filmmakers will invariably tell you that endings are crucial to a movie, but they often forget to put this elementary lesson into practice. As screenwriter Robert Towne once commented, “If you don’t have a strong finish to a film, you’re in serious trouble. It can be muted. It can be explosive. It can be a bang or a whimper, but it better be memorable, or else people will remember very little about the movie.”

In light of that unassailable argument, how did filmmakers as savvy as Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton bungle the endings of their latest movies so completely? Probably the endings to “A.I.” and “Planet of the Apes” were exactly what Spielberg and Burton intended, but the directors miscalculated, and I suspect that is why audience reaction to both films has been so hostile.

The ending has always had a disproportionate influence on how a viewer evaluates a movie. If a movie has a riveting conclusion, audiences are happy to overlook its earlier flaws. By contrast, if the picture has a bummer of an ending, people forget almost everything they liked about the film. The two versions of “Planet of the Apes” illustrate this point perfectly.

The original 1968 movie had a fresh concept and dynamic direction by Franklin J. Schaffner, but it was far from a perfect film; some of the writing was crass and preachy, and the ape makeup, though fun, was hardly the height of technical sophistication. Despite its gaffes and missteps, the movie left audiences feeling jazzed. The famous Statute of Liberty ending was a knockout--not merely because it was a neat surprise twist, but because it brilliantly brought together all of the movie’s themes. It reinforced Charlton Heston’s misanthropic credo, articulated throughout the film, and it clarified exactly why the apes were so frightened and suspicious of their human slaves.

The new version directed by Burton couldn’t possibly have the freshness that excited people when they saw the 1968 film. Still, there are good moments in the remake. The apes have a more animalistic ferocity than they did in the original, and the action scenes are energetic and scary.

Yet whatever virtues the new movie contains are obliterated by the conclusion. Burton and his writers try for a surprise ending comparable to the twist in the original. But their Lincoln Memorial coda makes no sense at all. Try to figure out what it means, and you’re sure to end up scratching your head and scoffing at the movie’s desperation.

No wonder the movie, one of the most eagerly anticipated of the year, fizzled so quickly at the box office (notable even in a summer of huge second week drop-offs of big popcorn films). People hated the ending, and that meant--despite all the artistry that went into the makeup and the special effects--they walked out hating the movie.

‘A.I.’ Self-Destructs in Its Final Third

I would argue this is also the main reason why so many people hated the other eagerly awaited sci-fi fantasy of the summer, Spielberg’s “A.I.” Many viewers were troubled by the coldness of the mother (Frances O’Connor) toward her robot child, Haley Joel Osment, and that may have contributed to the negative word of mouth. Still, the depiction of the mother is a defensible artistic choice. Much of the film, in fact, is legitimately disturbing and quite compelling.

The sibling rivalry that propels the first third of the movie is astringently observed, and although the movie veers off in a different direction in the second section, some of these scenes are effective too.

Yet the movie self-destructs in its final third. The leap 2000 years into the future introduces a whole new plot--and a cast of familiar Spielbergian extraterrestrials--way too late in the movie. Stanley Kubrick did something similar in the last section of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which probably served to inspire Spielberg.

But the coda to “2001” worked, first of all, because it was brief, compared with the protracted final section of “A.I.” More crucially, the images that Kubrick created at the end of the movie were genuinely haunting and mysterious.

Even if they were somewhat befuddling, they were open-ended and intriguing enough to stimulate endless discussions that contributed to the movie’s head-trip mystique.

The “A.I.” ending, by contrast, is staggeringly simplistic. It belabors the obvious point that Osment longs to become a real boy and to be reunited with his mother. This cloying Pinocchio finale is so tedious that it annihilates your memories of the really good things in the movie, and you walk out in a sour, fighting mood, ready to lynch the man who made you endure such a heavy load of quasi-mystical drivel. Spielberg is one of the few directors who is not required to test his movies. If he had tested “A.I.,” audiences would have registered their dissatisfaction with the ending in no uncertain terms.

Admittedly, research screenings and focus groups are often counterproductive, but sometimes they can underscore a thunderingly obvious point that even the most revered auteur can overlook.

In testing their movies, studios are fanatically concerned about endings because they know the very last impressions color responses to an entire film. That’s why endings are so often re-shot or re-cut after test screenings.

The most famous example is “Fatal Attraction,” which added a crude, bloodthirsty finale after preview audiences resisted the more ironic, low-keyed ending that the filmmakers had originally designed. The success of that movie in its revamped version has led to a lot more tampering with endings, though the results are rarely so successful.

Memorable Movies Have Memorable Endings

A good ending should be the logical outgrowth of a thoughtfully constructed plot, and by the time you get to the final editing, it’s usually too late to re-conceive the entire story. A lot earlier in the process, writers and directors should make absolutely certain that they have the perfect ending.

Almost invariably, the most memorable movies also have the most memorable endings. Think of the revelation of Rosebud in “Citizen Kane,” the airport scene in “Casablanca,” or Joe E. Brown’s rejoinder to Jack Lemmon--”Well, nobody’s perfect”--in “Some Like It Hot.”

Of course, a classic movie doesn’t have to end with a great line or a great visual jolt like the hand rising from the grave in “Carrie.” “The Godfather” ends with a very simple gesture: Al Pacino closing the door on Diane Keaton. But that quiet ending conclusively and devastatingly underscores the utter coldness of the newly anointed godfather, Michael Corleone.

Even less perfect movies, however, can benefit from potent endings. In “The Way We Were,” the political arguments between Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford grew repetitive, and the evocation of the blacklist era was disappointingly superficial.

But the final meeting between Streisand and Redford was one of the great bittersweet romantic endings in the history of movies, and the film’s imperfections dissolved in the outpouring of tears that unified the audience during the last five minutes.

I would also put “The Sixth Sense” in this category of deeply flawed movies redeemed by a killer finish--an ingenious twist that made everyone want to go back to see the entire film again. M. Night Shyamalan’s next movie, “Unbreakable,” was in many ways a more provocative, more elegantly crafted film. But it imploded at the end, when it unveiled a surprise kicker that seemed ridiculous rather than mesmerizing.

In a way, it’s heartbreakingly unfair when good work is lost because of a botched ending. People who hated the endings of “Unbreakable” or “A.I.” don’t give enough credit to the imaginative scenes earlier in the movie.

To take another example, last year’s “Dr. T and the Women” had some splendid moments. The dizzyingly chaotic interludes in Dr. T’s gynecological clinic were among the funniest and most technically dazzling scenes that Robert Altman has ever directed. But no one remembered anything except the bizarre ending--a surrealistic, very graphic childbirth scene that seemed to come from a different movie.

Or consider the case of “Ghost World,” which may be the best American movie released so far this year. Unfortunately, I doubt that it’s going to endure as a classic, and the reason is that the strangely subdued ending--though hardly in the stupefying category of “Dr. T” or “A.I.” or “Planet of the Apes”--is a letdown. It’s puzzling and muffled in a way that diminishes rather than enriches the movie.

To my mind, the ending of “Ghost World” is only a minor flaw, but I suspect that when people are thinking back on the year’s best films, many of them will forget the achievements of Terry Zwigoff’s movie, simply because it fizzles in its final stretch.

Anyone who’s been in a packed movie theater recognizes the rush that rips through an audience pleased by a rousing finish. Another screenwriting sage, William Goldman, put it this way: “When the end of a movie is the most exciting or emotionally involving part, then the audience troops happily out of the darkness, and that’s how word of mouth is born.” Conversely, an audience left hanging by a dim ending looks more like the troop of zombies in “Night of the Living Dead.”