First, credit where credit is due, the OP’s title comes naturally from a line from the Steely Dan song Kid Charlemagne.
It’s the critical moment in the film when the character knows that not only has he f ’ ed up royally but now has passed the point of no returning. Nothing again will ever be the same.
I can name two.
In Fargo, when William H. Macy’s character is interviewed for the second time by Frances McDormand’s character.
He figures he had handled the first one well enough. McDormand doesn’t suspect anything from Macy at first but the pressure is just too much. He fidgets and stammers away until McDormand knows something is up and you can see that the poor guy, one of filmdom’s most pathetic losers, realizes the jig is up and he has no other recourse but to flee. The film captures Lundegaard’s continuous slow-motion disaster perfectly and you can see Macy’s character falling deeper and deeper into this hole he made and has no hope of crawling out of it.
In Quiz Show, when Ralph Fiennes confesses to his father the sham and shenanigans he had perpetrated, you have to feel sorry for him -though he was in that mess because he had gotten himself in that mess- the sense of desperation and shame seems one any of us could identify with.
I think the best example of this in the past few years would be Requiem for a Dream. In fact, it takes world destruction of the four leads to an excessive and extreme level, giving a painful ten minutes of cinema:
as a result of shooting up into his infected arm, the lead character gets it amputated in a Southern prison hospital, where he and his friend are imprisoned for a long term of years. Simultaneously, his mother is blasted into a vegetative state with electroshock therapy and confined in a cell, never to rise again. And his girlfriend, desparate for drugs, begins participating in sleazy lesbian sex shows in front of the drug dealer’s friends.
That scene where Jack realizes that he is Tyler, after the phone call with Marla, and then his subsequent conversation with Tyler. The whole…“We have just lost cabin pressure” and the line “It’s called a changeover- the movie goes on and no one in the audience has any idea.”
And of course, the ending where the world literally falls apart, building by building…
I suppose in a way The Matrix would qualify. The “world crumbling” scene doesn’t come at the end of the movie, but in the middle, and of course the movie as a whole has a happy or at least hopeful ending.
Perhaps more in keeping with what the OP has in mind, the ending to Seven (or if you insist, Se7en).
How about The Truman Show? That film was pretty much all about the protagonist’s world falling apart, sometimes literally, as in the first scene where a spotlight comes crashing down from the (apparently) clear blue sky.
Not a film (well, not usually associated with film), but Macbeth’s ‘stepped in blood’ speech pretty much describes this happening. And Othello in Act V, too, where he realises that Iago played him - and earlier when he becomes convinced that Desdemona is cheating on him. I guess Shakespeare is good at this sort of thing.
I love that play. I could talk about it for hours.
And, for that matter, most of King Lear – but I’m thinking specifically of the scene just before he goes out in the storm:
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both!
If it be you that stir these daughters’ hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let not women’s weapons, water-drops,
Stain my man’s cheeks! No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall – I will do such things –
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I’ll weep;
No, I’ll not weep:
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!
I love the way the 1970 Peter Brook film handles this speech, with the camera going in and out of focus – it’s like you’re seeing through Lear’s eyes as his mind breaks up, but at the same time, you’re looking at him – very, very cool.
Michael confronts Frodo at the Havana New Year’s Eve party and gives him the kiss of death after telling him, “I know it was you Frodo. You broke my heart.”
