I’ve seen this movie three times now, and I just don’t get the ending. Why would Buddy want Dawn dead? Why would Guy want Dawn dead? It might make sense that Buddy would be willing to forgive Guy torturing him if he had a compelling reason to want Dawn out of the way, but Buddy had already taken credit from them for the Foster Kane movie, and if there’s another possible motive I missed it. All three times.
Guy feels jilted but still loves Dawn, and it seems out of character for him to shoot her. The end of the shooting scene seems to imply that Guy and Buddy had some sort of understanding about getting rid of Dawn, but this was never even hinted beforehand that I could see. The whole thing feels like ‘twist for twists sake’, and doesn’t have the foundation to make it feel plausible or effective. At least not to me. Anyone see something I didn’t?
A decent movie otherwise, although I thought Frank Whaley was a drip. Benecio Del Toro would have been more believable as Guy.
Gah! Hammie or whatever the cute little bugger is named ate my post!
To rephrase: By killing Dawn, Guy shows Buddy that he learned how to play the game and has the guts to play it. And he can get farther with Buddy’s help than with Dawn’s.
Guy is supposed to be a drip, and Whaley did a good job of it.
Sure, that explains why Guy might have been willing to kill Dawn if Buddy had wanted him to. But Buddy didn’t want him to, had no reason to want her dead, and certainly wouldn’t have forgiven Guy for tying him to a chair and beating him for hours when he had nothing to gain by Dawn’s death. The whole thing was random and pat and pointless.
And yeah, Whaley was supposed to be a drip, but the idea that an attractive, intelligent, successful producer would fall for a drip wasn’t very convincing. Use him, sure. Sleep with him, maybe. Love, unlikely.
The movie was clever, but for me it fell pretty short in providing believable motivations for it’s characters.
Except that Guy regains control over Buddy by being able to implicate him. Also, I think that the positive publicity from Guy being a hero helps the new film’s receipts.
Remember, though, that the film is about the callousness of Hollywood, and the allegory stands pretty well, I think.
It also helps to know the circumstances leading up to the creation of the movie. Huang was working as a production assistant on one of Robert Rodriguez’s films. They became friends, and Huang expressed his frustrations over the politics of the industry, and how he wanted to make his own movies, and how he envied Rodriguez’s ability to just do it. Rodriguez told him to borrow the money and do it. Swimming With Sharks is the product of that conversation.