Movies that DON'T cop out.

Cafe Society
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In contrast to [thread=334238]this thread[/thread], what are some films that lent themselves to easy copouts but didn’t? (By copouts, I mean improbable escapes for the progatonist, easy moral lessons, “'twas but a dream,”, et cetera.)

2001: A Space Oddessy is the first one that pops off the brain. Kubrick could have made it easy and accessible, given the aliens some form and purpose (as was done in the excreable AI) but instead left it a mystery for the audience to ponder. Carol Reed’s The Third Man (written by Graham Green) does right as well; it’s sort of the anti-Casablanca, and was a perfect statement on the coming Cold War. And Frankenheimer’s original ending to Ronin (which is featured as a deleted scene on the DVD) is right, test audiences be damned.

The Director’s Cuts of both Brazil and Blade Runner replace the “safe” studio-approved endings with the bleak nihilism appropriate to those stories.

The Mitchem noir, Out Of The Past, directed by Jacques Tourneur, ends only as noir should…with the “hero” worse off than when he started. Chinatown gets this exactly right, and completes the metaphor. “Forget about it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” I find it nearly impossible to believe that Robert Towne’s original ending had Jake rescuing Evelyn and her daughter from Noah Cross. Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan does the right thing, making all of the character’s efforts in vain. A beautiful moral tragedy worthy of the best of film noir.

I’m not a big fan of Spielberg–the man whose career is littered with copout endings–but his ending to Raiders of the Lost Ark, cribbed from Citizen Kane, is perfection. “We have top men working on it. Top. Men.”

The Charlie Kaufman/Michel Gondry film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind also had the correct ending. Kaufman’s Adaptation was a total copout, but an intentional, mocking one; I just wish that he’d left in the Swamp Ape.

So what other writers/directors took the risk and ended the film “correctly” rather than safely or conventionally?

Stranger

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The Godfather, I and II, both had endings that were true to the stories. The Conversation, which Coppola made between the two, also did.

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I don’t consider happy endings to be cop-outs. A tacked-on, impossible happy ending yes, but not a happy ending in and of itself.

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The Wages of Fear has a truly great non cop-out ending.

Re: Blade Runner - not to get sidetracked into the usual debate, but I rather like the original ending : it’s so obviously a lie, a fantasy they might tell themselves to avoid dealing with their inevitable fate. Whereas the director’s cut is just kind of bleakly ambiguous.

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Whaaaatt?? I can’t speak for “Blade Runner” (since I’ve only seen the director’s cut), but there the studio released cut of “Brazil” was pretty damn bleak, nihilistic and unsafe (in Hollywood movie terms) to begin with. I mean, Johnathan Glover ends up freakin’ lobotomized fer cryin’ out loud! Gilliam’s genius be damned, I couldn’t even bear the thought of seeing the director’s cut given the fact that it is supposedly even bleaker.

As for movies that didn’t cop out, Election held on to it’s cynical, mean-spirited view (of how high school fosters beaurocracy & pettiness over productive thinking) to the bitter end, as opposed to, for example, “Heathers” in which Veronica (Wynona Ryder) “rises above it all in the end” and thus sabotages it’s bitter message.

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Oh shit, I thought that was the WORST cop-out ending ever!

Sure, it wasn’t a HAPPY ending…but it looked like Clouzot just dragged an arbitrary anticlimax out of his arse.

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Actually, the Brazil ending we all know was not the one the studio approved. It skipped that last lobotomy part and had the movie actually have Sam settle out in the little country oasis happily ever after.

Livid that the studio was planning on releasing this version of the film, Gilliam sneaked a copy of his version to critics, who immediately started raving (the L.A. film critics even named it Best Picture of 1985 before it had been released theatrically). At that point, the studio was in a bind and couldn’t really release their ending, so they kept Gilliam’s.

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Se7en

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John Sayles’ Lone Star. I don’t want to spoil it, but I loved the conclusion and was shocked that an American movie would be allowed to end that way. Fantastic film.

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I also loved the ending to his film Limbo.

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On the B-movie teen flick front:

The Last American Virgin: the main character gets screwed over all throughout the movie. Even when he does a gallant thing like paying for a girl’s abortion (she got knocked up by his “friend”), he ends up losing her at the end of the movie when she returns to the “friend”. He drives off at the end, nearly in tears, as the credits roll.

It went against nearly all the teen flicks of its era.

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A lot of dark comedies will end in a way that feels honest to the audience. Very Bad Things is one where the end is just as marosely comic as the rest of the movie.

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Well, it’s Jonathon Pryce, and as ArchiveGuy points out, the original studio cut per Universal Studios head Sidney Sheinberg’s instructions had many of the film elements changed, including the incoherent combintation of Sam’s dream sequences into one scene, the emphasis of the action elements, and most abominably, the trimming of the final post-lobotomy scene, instead leaving off with the impression that Sam and Jill had escaped to their little shack in the country. The original cinematic release restored some of the footage, including the ending, though only after a protracted battle between Gilliam and the studio, which ArchiveGuy aludes to, and which is detailed in the book The Battle of Brazil : Terry Gilliam v. Universal Pictures in the Fight to the Final Cut. Gilliam is truly a modern day Orson Welles in ways both good and bad.

I have to agree with your assessment of Election–a nice little film indeed–and he did essentially the same with About Schmidt. I have to admit I’ve been a bit on the fence about Payne’s Sideways. He seems to give it a happy ending, but then, we know that Miles hasn’t really changed even as he’s walking up the stairs, and I’ve the nagging feeling that after the reel stops spinning he’ll figure out a way to bollocks it up somehow.

Talking about Nickelson, I’ve thought that Five Easy Pieces ended right (with Nickelson abandoning everything to run away from his life–again). Taxi Driver, with its heroic fantasy dream sequence, and the original The Manchurian Candidate ends on a suitably ambiguous note. Come to think of it, then end of Frankenheimer’s Seconds is just about the most perfect bleak ending of any film, comperable to Brazil, actually.

As far as “happy endings” go…virtually all seem kind of tacked on. By that, I mean that life just doesn’t have happy endings. Endings that are bittersweet, that imply further development or a life remaining to be lived (as opposed to bleak, nihilistic endings) are quite alright–I’ll count Roman Holiday, Rear Window, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and the almost universally SMDB-panned Lost In Translation as some of my favorite non-bleak but untied endings, but triumphant or sacchirinely-complete endings just turn me off. Not every movie has to end like The Wild Bunch ("It’s not like the old days, but it’ll do,) or Das Boot, but we’re thankful that they don’t all end like a Disney-sponsored flic, a la the recent The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (Bleh.)

Stranger

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The Hitchcock version of *Rebecca * in 1940.

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Amen to that. It seemed like a tacked-on unhappy ending. It was like Clouzot said “Oops, he made it. Wait, wait. Zis is European film. Must have bleak ending.” It didn’t even follow from the character. A guy with gonads of steel is able to deliver a truck full of nitro over rough terrain is then stupid enough make an empty truck dance a waltz on a mountain road?I didn’t buy it.

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How about Deep Impact? Or Return to Planet of the Apes?

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I guess Dr. Strangelove. It was the appropriate ending, but it was in no way a cop out. Same goes for The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly - even though Clint allows the guy to live, it kept with his character more than anything else would.

Another Gilliam film, 12 Monkeys, has a brilliant ending. As far as endings go, it is probably the bleakest I have ever seen, even surpassing Brazil.

And, for my last entry, I’ll nominate Trainspotting. Sure, it ends upbeat, but we as an audience know he hasn’t broken his habit and even if he does, his life will be no better for it. Great, truthful message.

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I agree that Wages of Fear WAS a copout, tacked-on bleak ending. The same with the original version of The Italian Job, but it’s less of a problem to put an ambiguous ending on a comedy. Compare it with Sorcerer, William Friedkin’s remake of Wages of Fear.

Roy Scheider finishes the job, but his past is catching up with him anyway.

Was Sam really lobotomized in Brazil? I always got the impression that he withdrew completely into his fantasies on his own. And there were three versions of Brazil. There was Gilliam’s original cut, which was shown outside the U.S (and is now considered the Director’s Cut). To try to meet the contractual time limit, he trimmed about 4 minutes (including a scene shot from Sam’s POV just after his arrest, when his friends express their disappointment with him and he hears about the options on how to pay for his interrogation), and that was the version eventually released to theaters in the U.S. And the head of Universal Studios took all of the available footage and had his editors working on a love-conquers-all version.

Not a movie, but I like to think that Basil died at the end of Fawlty Towers, which is the proper ending for a mean-spirited comedy.

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The original Night of the Living Dead certainly didn’t cop out. No survivors. All the arguing about whether to go to the upstairs or the basement rendered pointless…especially because the “hero” turned out to be wrong about which was best.

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You left out the fact that at about the same time Yves Montand’s character, Mario, dies in the truck accident, we see his girlfriend suddenly drop dead. I don’t object to the fact that movie had to end on such a down note but Clouzot seemed to be going well out his way (almost to the point of parody) to make it as unhappy as possible. I thought it would’ve been a nice ironic touch if they would’ve had Mario’s partner, the old guy who turns yellow halfway through the trip, survive just barely so he’d end up with all the money but be too badly crippled up to enjoy it. However, that’s just me playing armchair director. You may disagree.