In “The Film Snob’s Dictionary,” writers David Kamp and Lawrence Levi cheekily chart out the differences between Movies and Films (“It’s a Movie if it’s black-and-white because it’s old. It’s a Film if it’s black-and-white because it’s Jarmuschy.”) They might have added another definition: It’s a Movie if it ends. It’s a Film if it stops. ¶The ambiguous ending has long been one of the hallmarks of the classic art-house film, as reliable a convention of independent filmmaking as guns are to Westerns or fireballs are to action spectacles. (Granted, once in a while a mainstream blockbuster will leave audiences hanging: Was Leonardo DiCaprio still dreaming at the end of “Inception”?) ¶This year alone, filmgoers have been provoked (or infuriated, depending on their need for closure) by several non-ending endings: In Kelly Reichardt’s “Meek’s Cutoff,” the band of 19th-century settlers whose trek she methodically follows are on the verge of deciding which path to take just as the movie ends. In “Take Shelter,” Jeff Nichols’s insinuatingly creepy
drama about a man who may or may not be preparing for the apocalypse, an epilogue leaves viewers more uncertain than ever whether it was all in his head.
And in “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” opening Friday, writer-director Sean Durkin leaves the eponymous multi-monikered protagonist similarly in the lurch, with Elizabeth Olsen’s title character literally on a road that could end in disaster or the shaky promise of a new life.
The indeterminate final scene of “Martha Marcy May Marlene” is a textbook study in the inconclusive conclusion, which has produced a rhetoric all its own among the actors and filmmakers on publicity tours, hoping to break audiences of their addiction to the happy — or at least final — ending. “The movie begins in a transition from one place to another, and it ends in transition from one place to another,” Olsen told The Post’s Monica Hesse last week. “We go to movies because we want to see wrapped-up stories, but our whole lives are nothing but transitions — people don’t want to accept it [on-screen], but that’s how we are every day.”
Okay, we get it: Rocky doesn’t always win, the shark doesn’t always die and Dorothy doesn’t always get back to Kansas. Life is messy! Art imitates life! But that doesn’t help us with the essential questions: What does Bill Murray say to Scarlett Johansson at the end of “Lost in Translation”? Will Mickey Rourke be okay at the end of “The Wrestler”? What the frickety-frack was up with that storm at the end of “A Serious Man”? (Blame the Bible for that one, folks.)
And, perhaps most confounding: When is a non-ending ending a legitimate artistic choice, and when is it just a cop-out? The answer lies in how effectively a filmmaker creates characters whom viewers are willing to care about and identify with — to the point of being willing to join them in perpetual limbo.
Ambiguous endings may provide toothsome fodder for chat boards, DVD extras and satirical Web videos. But they’re serious business, entailing their own rules that filmmakers break at their peril. Unless they’re Christopher Nolan, for example, no director is allowed to use the “It was only a dream” gambit. And even he wasn’t born with the privilege: His run-in-reverse breakout film “Memento” was more style than substance, inducing a shrug of indifference rather than genuine intrigue.
_1337038921.jpg)
Loading...
Comments