Se7en.
Dancer in the Dark.
(I hate movies without redemption.)
I asume you meant to exclude most horror movies in your OP as well, tdn. Not a lot of redemption in Texas Chainsaw Massacre or House of a Thousand Corpses.
I am going to argue that “Yojimbo” (one of my all time favorites) does not fit the mode.
- the hero’s “job” is to hire out to whoever will pay him. Being masterless, he no longer has any allegiance. So there’s no real “selling out” in this case. He further decides to play the two corrupt sides of the town off each other - to his benefit.
- there are actually two redemptions: the return of the girl to her family (completely for no benefit, and ends up getting him beat to crap), and the return of the (corrupted) town back to the innkeeper (if he was truly as evil and soulless as he makes out to be, he could have just killed him along with all the rest).
As I said in the OP, let’s exclude revenge movies, in which the theme is he who is humbled shall be exhalted. My question is more along the lines of he who is exalted (through misdeeds) shall be… what?
There was not a classic ‘good guy’ in that flick anywhere, nor was there a case of a bad guy seeing the error of his ways. Sure, it was a revenge flick, and Porter got the girl, but as they drove off into the sunset (actually the dawn, looking for breakfast) you knew they weren’t going to find a quiet town to settle down in and join the PTA.
Get Carter (the original Michael Caine version, not the Sylvester Stallone remake). It’s a revenge movie in the sense that Carter was killing the people who had killed his brother, but Carter didn’t actually care about his brother - he was more offended that they had killed somebody related to him and how this reflected on his reputation. Carter then went on a killing spree, got his “revenge”, and never had a redemption.
A Clockwork Orange?
“I was cured, all right.”
*lilja-4-ever. *
“Match Point” -
spoiler alert (I’ve lost my spoiler tag directions) -
Main character kills inconveniently pregnant girlfriend; lives happily ever after.
Kind Hearts and Coronets
“A hilarious study in the gentle art of murder.”
First of all, you’re kind of playing the no-true-Scotsman game; any movie that doesn’t have a happy ending gets defined as a “revenge movie,” or something, so is out of the discussion.
Secondly, the way you frame your OP is pretty revealing of what’s wrong with Hollywood today. Well, it’s revealing of what’s wrong with Hollywood since 1934.
The reason you’re conditioned to expect such an ending is that such endings were mandated in Hollywood from 1934 to 1967, the peak years of one of the most significant cultural phenomena in the history of mankind. So that mandate, called the Hays code, is substantially responsible for the way your average Western human processes “story,” and thus defines your expectations.
Which sucks. Because some of the great films of world cinema–i.e., cinema from countries who were, what, mature enough not to have to mandate happy endings for their audiences, do not sacrifice artistic truth for the artificial happy ending. (And just to be clear here: I’m including “the bad guy gets it” as a happy ending, because that’s a happy ending for the audience’s expectations.)
One of the reason Douglas Sirk, one of the most interesting figures in movie history, left Hollywood after the greatest commercial success of his career, was because Hollywood was artistically corrupt in its total, unquestioning commitment to the universal happy ending. (People around here tend to give me shit about my love of Paul Verhoeven, but that’s one of my favorite things about him: his hooting disrespect for the convention of the Happy Ending[sup]TM[/sup].)
Keep in mind that *most *movies get the ending wrong. There are no real endings in life; something always happens next. So the ending of a story is a completely artificial invention in the first place. When your entire story is driven by a foregone and inescapable, pre-determined happy ending–mandated from '34 to '67 by the Catholic Church, and mandated since then by the audience’s expectations (cf. the OP)–then it’s just statistically likely that the movie’s gonna suck. (Insert obligatory reference to Sturgeon.)
Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark addresses this pretty forcefully. The theme of this movie is that if you’re going to be that kind of audience, that insists on neat happy endings where everything turns out “right”–if you’re going to be so emotionally immature that you turn over the maintenance of your emotional life to Stephen Spielberg–then you deserve what you get.
A good movie should be an artistically collaborative event between its creator and its audience. A great example is Bulworth. (Spoiler warning) In Bulworth, a politician who’s faced his own death and accepted it discovers that this gives him absolute freedom to speak the truth–how scary is an insurance lobbyist when you’ve prepared yourself for death? When, at the end, he’s hit by a sniper’s bullet, the movie ends with an external shot of the hospital. Period. We don’t know whether he lives or dies: we only know that the situation he’s prepared himself for has happened. This puts the entire thing in the audience’s lap: YOU have to decide if he lived or died, and in doing so you imagine ALL the possible outcomes of both scenarios, rather than simply swallowing the pat ending–which couldn’t possibly be as good as the ones you imagine–spoonfed to you by Hollywood Committee to Fulfill the Lowest Common Audience Expectations. This ending engages you, and you must participate in the thought experiment that Beatty has offered.
. . . I’m sorry, what was the question?
Well, no, not really. In movies such as The Devil Wears Prada and Rock Star, no wrong was done to the protagonists at the outset of the movie. These could have easily have had unhappy (or at least undeserved happiness) endings. But that sort of ending is not what we come to expect from Hollywood, as you have correctly said.
It’s interesting that we have sort of come to expect the protagonist to end up where he started, though a bit wiser. In a revenge flick, the protagonist does not usually end up with the big bag of money, though sometimes he does. (Ocean’s 11 comes to mind).
You are right, though, I am narrowly defining a subset of movies – Those in which a person claws his way to the top by using or abusing his friends, and/or displayng some other moral breakdown on the way up.
Well, Blackadder’s Christmas Carol is about as anti-redemptive as it gets. Personally, I hate presto-change-o redemption and it’s just-as-ugly twin, contrived justice (i.e. good guy catches bad guy, can’t kill him because that’d make good guy just as bad as bad guy, bad guy takes a swing at good guy, misses, falls over railing into vat of acid).
The Bad Lieutenant?
BTW, they changed the ending from the book … or rather they omitted the ending altogether. In the book:
he murders his way to the top. But his mother in law takes poison, and does it in a way that makes it look like he poisoned her. So he gets arrested for a murder he didn’t do.
Many of the great mob movies since “Godfather”. E.g., “Goodfellas”. (Haven’t seen “The Departed” yet, but I’ll assume the above mention indicates it fits.) Once you’re in, you’re in for life. Story arcs that take a normal enough guy and he ends up permanently in crime with little or no regret. A variation of the anti-hero theme.
I’d say Goodfellas had a happy ending. All the mobsters ended up either dead, in jail or in the witness protection program. As the protagonist makes clear, none of those are happy endings for the mobsters.
I haven’t read the books but the Damon film ends with Ripley killing his lover to avoid being exposed by Meredith which I would say counts as a pretty severe consequence of his earlier actions. Of course by the time he morphs into John Malkovich in Ripley’s Game he’s well over it.
How about Trainspotting?
At the end, the protagonist runs off with the money and explains that he did it because “I’m a bad person”.
The question was, “Why should we go to a theater and pay good money to be brutalized by some clinically depressed director’s nihilism?”
Well, that was my question anyway. I don’t see a good answer anywhere in your post.