Endless Summer

Twist endings are in a special category: like walking a wire without a net, they run the risk of total disaster. But when they work—as "The Sixth Sense" did, spectacularly—they make you rewind the entire movie in your mind, and want to see it again. M. Night Shyamalan, a victim of his own success, has been trying to duplicate this frisson, with diminishing returns, ever since. Twist endings appeal to the child in us: I can remember the pleasure my 11-year-old self took in the fake-out at the end of Billy Wilder's "Witness for the Prosecution," when the true identity of the murderer was revealed, a sleight of hand not unlike the shock of the Keyser Soze revelation in "The Usual Suspects."

Sometimes it's not a plot twist that catches you by surprise, but a wallop of emotion that sneaks up on you from left field. I'm thinking of the wrenching coda that caps Alexander Payne's "About Schmidt": Jack Nicholson's gruff Omaha widower writing a letter to accompany his charity donation to a child in Africa he's never met. It's not an ending you could have possibly seen coming, yet, like all memorable endings, it feels inevitable. It's a metaphor that perfectly illuminates the emotional awakening our hero has undergone. So many of the most beloved endings in movies leave us daubing our eyes in grief, from "Brief Encounter" to the magnificent kitsch of "Now, Voyager" ("Why reach for the moon when we have the stars?") to the devastating image of the two worn cowboy shirts on the one closet hanger in "Brokeback Mountain."

Stanley Kubrick knew a thing or two about endings: can anybody forget the exploding mushroom clouds at the closing of "Dr. Strangelove," the apocalypse played to the tune of the nostalgic '40s ballad "We'll Meet Again"? And of course the mystical and mystifying conclusion to "2001: A Space Odyssey," an image of cosmic rebirth that has been parsed and probed for decades. There's much to be said for a conclusion that leaves us with a question, not an answer. The lack of closure in a brain-tease like Michael Haneke's "Caché" (not to mention the brilliantly frustrating blackout that ended HBO's "The Sopranos") makes it impossible to stop thinking about what you've just seen. The right riddle ending extends the life of the movie far beyond its running time.

When someone does come up with an original ending, everyone apes it. Brian De Palma faked us out, and freaked us out, at the end of "Carrie" with that final, unexpected jolt from the beyond the grave—you thought the movie was over, but it wasn't. The trick was so inspired, it was immediately imitated by every horror movie, until it curdled into an annoying cliché. Likewise, the freeze frame on the face of Jean-Pierre Léaud at the end of François Truffaut's great movie about adolescence, "The 400 Blows," started a trend that lasted decades.

My own favorite recent romantic happy ending comes at the end of Richard Linklater's superb talkathon "Before Sunset," in a scene between Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, two former lovers who meet again after a life-changing separation. The screen goes blank a moment before we expect it to—before the clinch—on a thrilling note of suspended romantic expectation so artfully timed it takes your breath away. Far more common, alas, is the egregious happy ending in which the lovers declare their passion for each other in a public place, surrounded by strangers who burst into wild applause as they kiss. Martin Scorsese may have been the last director to get away with this (just barely) in "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" in 1974, but it has become a self-congratulatory staple of some of the worst movies in recent memory ("The Majestic" and "Trust the Man," to name two you probably had the good fortune to miss) and even some not-so-bad romantic comedies such as "Love Actually." Earlier this year it reared its inane head in "27 Dresses." Is it too much to hope that not a single summer movie this year will feature this shameless spectacle at its climax? That would be a very happy ending indeed.

© 2008