The affirming message that comes out of most movies, esp. those aimed at young audiences, is “Go for the gold!” or “Follow your dream!” or “You can do it if you keep your eye on the ball!” Well, that’s a message that sells tickets and puts butts in theater seats.
But what about the movies with the opposite message? “Settle for the plain girl and know your place,” “Know your limitations,” “Keep your expectations realistic”? A lot of surprisingly good movies have these downer message, including a disproportionate number from icons John Hughes and Spike Lee.
Here are the ones I can think of: Marty
Only the Lonely (essentially a remake of Marty) Pretty in Pink
Some Kind of Wonderful
Mo’ Better Blues
Jungle Fever
I think JF’s message was more subtle, that the main couple were doomed from the beginning. However the background couple are still together at the end, so it seemed more like it was saying their relationship was more genuine.
Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It pained me terribly when it was pointed out the me, because it’s my favorite Disney film, but it’s true. Belle sings her first song about how she wants “adventure in the great wide somewhere” inspired by her books, and then she ends up sitting around in a castle with a great library…but very little adventure. Apparently the adventure of finding her Twoo Wuv was all the adventure she needed, and now she can settle down with a new stack of books.
Well, one persons ‘settling’ might be another persons ‘discovering what real happiness is’. While I agree that Belle deciding that finding her true love seems a bit treacly, don’t forget that at that point she might well have had her fair share of adventure and excitement (which a jedi craves not).
Another, both brilliant and upsetting version of this is Bull Durham (which for my money is one of the best movies of the 1980s) in which the idiot character gets to fulfill his dream but the two actual heroes - Annie and Crash - are both put in a position of reassessing their dreams. And it’s great.
If you think Disney’s version is bad, watch the Hallmark version with George C. Scott, or the Fairy Tale Theater version with Klaus Kinski. They claim to be saying that you should judge people by their hearts, rather than their looks, but you can’t help smelling a whiff of “It’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man.”
Can’t Hardly Wait - After a breakup with her popular high school jock boyfriend (Facinelli), Amanda (Hewitt) basically ends up with the first clingy loser (Embry) who writes something nice about her.
Is that the film where the main character was “cursed” with super strength, everlasting life and a giant castle in exchange for a lot of hair?
It’s never easy to say what the moral of a piece of fiction is. I would say that these four films finish with the main characters deciding that they can’t get everything they want:
Shakespeare in Love (1998, U.S./U.K., dir. John Madden) The Last American Virgin (1982, U.S., dir. Boaz Davidson) Casablanca (1942, U.S., dir. Michael Curtiz) Play It Again, Sam (1972, U.S., dir. Herbert Ross)
The first one has the hero and heroine decided that there’s no good way for them be together, so they each go off to do something else. The second one has the hero devastated at the end, realizing that nothing he’s done has persuaded the women he wants to be interested in him instead of the jerk she’s dating. I think that Casablanca shows that people have to settle in certain respects. Yeah, Rick learns what his mission is, but he does so by realizing that he has to give up the woman he loves. Play it Again, Sam also has the hero realizing that he can’t have the woman he loves.
Jane Austen’s Emma has been adapted as a movie, and a significant part of the plot involves Emma trying to land a gentleman husband for her friend Harriet. Harriet is a nice enough girl but neither wealthy nor intelligent. (She’s also illegitimate.) Emma persuades Harriet to turn down a marriage proposal from a decent, respectable farmer who Harriet actually likes, saying that he’s not good enough for her. But none of the gentlemen Emma considers suitable matches for Harriet are interested in her, and in the end both women realize that the farmer was a good match for Harriet. When he proposes again, she accepts.
Yeah, the ending of Pretty in Pink was changed so Andie wouldn’t end up with the guy from her own social class.
However, The Breakfast Club ends with the nerd character Brian apparently having to accept his place as the nerd. Not only is he the only one of the five who’s still single, but stuck writing the essay for everyone else. Claire even tells him she’s not going to be friends with him later. Although I guess one could argue that Brian’s situation changes less because, unlike the others, he didn’t really need to learn a lesson about not judging others or not adopting a false persona. He just needed to learn that minor failures aren’t the end of the world.
As DrFidelius says, it was the prince’s castle to begin with. The Beast isn’t immortal either; he nearly dies at the end and would have died had Belle not broken the curse. It’s also suggested that his humanity is fading away, so had he remained a beast he might eventually have lost his human intelligence.