Here’s something to feel good about

Somewhere in the midsection of the 1980s, there was a mainstream multiplex in Philadelphia that decided, for some reason, to book “The Ruling Class,” an astringent comedy of ill manners in which a British lord (Peter O’Toole) goes from being beatifically daffy to sadistically psychotic. It seemed odd even then that a 2 1/2-hour movie from 1972 would be given even a limited engagement in a first-run theater in a major market. Odder still that a huge crowd showed up on the first Saturday night of its run, though one supposed the folks were drawn by some advance hype about Peter Medak’s hyperbolic film being some sort of cult classic.

Turned out that the only thing that held up well in “The Ruling Class” was O’Toole’s characteristically flamboyant performance. But that wasn’t what I remembered most about that Saturday screening. It was the audience’s reaction afterward. Words like “unsettled” or “taken aback” don’t quite apply. These folks were in the kind of volatile funk that’s one speed-dial away from legal counsel.

It wasn’t the movie as a whole that aroused their anger. It was its bleak ending. They deeply resented being sent home unhappy, and many of them grumbled as much on the way out.

What gives? I wondered at the time. Had that much time passed since the era of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Nashville,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Five Easy Pieces,” “Thunderbolt and Lightfoot” and various other movies in which downbeat or (at best) bittersweet endings were more the rule than the exception? It didn’t seem so. But with hindsight, one recognizes that the masses wanted far more basic satisfactions from celluloid “product” than they did in, say, 1975, when “Jaws” set off the blockbuster era in which, for better and worse, we still live.

Yet, lately, it seems as if more movies are daring to be downers. It’s not just the edgy documentaries such as “Capturing the Friedmans” or even such gritty, thematically ambitious fringe items as “21 Grams.” We’re talking about Oscar contenders such as “Mystic River,” “Cold Mountain” and “House of Sand and Fog.” All are highly touted literary adaptations faithful enough to their sources to replicate their tragic denouements. And we’re not just talking about weepy love-lost endings that offer their own kind of popular catharsis. We’re talking total “Forget it, Jake, it’s Chinatown” desolation.

It’s probably way too early to spin trend pieces on the unhappy ending’s triumphant return. And it’s not as if unhappy endings have taken an absolute hiatus in recent years. “The Perfect Storm” and “Requiem for a Dream,” naming only two, came out in 2000, and one certainly couldn’t have called 1999’s “American Beauty” a ray of sunshine, though (again in hindsight) there was something a little too pat about its satire that blunted its tragic aspirations.

Still, this fresher crop of downbeat endings carries big stars and considerable ambitions for major awards. And with an ending as utterly despairing as that of “Sand and Fog” (sorry, no details here), it’s hard to believe DreamWorks, the company with the moonlight-and-nostalgia trademark, would ride such a somber yet handsomely adorned steed to the Academy Awards. One wishes the best for its cast and crew for taking such an impressive risk.

It’s not as if I want nothing but sad endings any more than I want nothing but happy endings. I’m against gratuitous endings of any kind. I’m against running formulas for success into the ground. And I’m for endings that are, within the context of their stories, consistent and believable. Is that too much to ask, Santa?

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Gene Seymour is a film critic at Newsday, a Tribune company.