Ha! Lame and labored Doors reference: nailed it!
Let’s talk about the endings of two great movies: THE LOBSTER and PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET. Or, rather, I’ll type and you read.
Both are excellent films, made over 60 years apart. Both feature writer/directors with a strong personal vision and style (Yorgos Lanthimos and Sam Fuller). Both dip and swerve around their respective genre constraints.
Fuller’s PICKUP is a ’50s crime film wrapped in Cold War paranoia in which no one is all good or all bad or all smart or all dumb. Everyone has an angle; no one is a hero. And the only thing that marks you as “good” is your own moral code. The characters and their dialogue is symphonic: a multitude of instruments, movements, key changes, tempo changes. Crackerjack words, but grounded in human-seeming emotion. (I mean, the characters and dialogue are still a bit over-the-top.)
Our petty criminal pickpocket protagonist Skip, played by Richard Widmark (an all-time great, and under-rated, actor) has unknowingly stolen a strip of MacGuffin-esque microfilm from a girl on the subway. This is The Girl in the story because these stories always have The Girl. She’s played by Jean Peters.
Anyway, the Girl has been an unwitting courier for some Communist agents by transporting state secrets to some shadowy contacts. This is revealed to her when it’s demanded that she track down and retrieve the microfilm from Skip by any means necessary. She finds him, but he’s since he’s ascertained the value of the microfilm, he won’t give it up to anyway–not her, not the NYPD, not the FBI–unless he gets paid a huge score. Complications ensue.
The whole thing zips along until an ambiguous and not-too-great ending.
In the penultimate scene Widmark/Skip, has beaten, literally, the antagonist and recovered the strip stolen microfilm. Has he kept it to sell to the Russians to make his last big score or has he returned it to the US G-men?
We don’t know.
But he’s gotten the girl. The love story is the most predictable and least convincing piece of the film. It’s forgivable though, except that it muddies the ending. We knew all along Widmark was gonna get the girl–what happened to the damn microfilm!
Perhaps, though, because Skip/Widmark’s moral code is strictly on the person-to-person level and not the person-to-country level, the fate of the microfilm doesn’t matter. This is a character who inadvertently filched the microfilm in the opening scene and then, when an FBI agent tries to convince him to return it for the good of America, says defiantly, “Are you waving the flag at me?”
Whereas you or I or any other typical American would’ve (probably) given the stuff up to the government, Skip/Widmark, as a three-time convict and victim of police harassment, isn’t beholden to any institution other than himself.
The ending of the film goes like this: Skip/Widmark tracks down the Communist agent who’s stolen back the microfilm (and roughed up/shot (!) the girl) and kicks the living shit out of him in a subway station. There’s the slight suggestion that he’s going to throw the Communist agent in front of an oncoming subway train, but instead knocks him out. Cut to the Skip/Widmark reuniting with the girl at the police station where she makes a comment about making sure he stays out of crime and they leave.
End of film. No mention of the microfilm. No mention of breaking up the Communist plot. No mention of patriotism or pats on the back or anything. It’s really a MacGuffin–the tiny engine that unspools the plot. The true climax is Skip/Widmark restoring his own dirty corner of the world to his moral code. His people got hurt, so he hurt the culprit back.
So why is this ending less than satisfying?
It’s probably the abruptness of it. The fight scene ends without any seconds spared for tension relief. It just ends, and we open the next scene in the police station with some more quick-witted, jargon-studded dialogue and he gets the girl and they leave.
Bing, bang, boom.
Fight, girl, fin.
It’s a rare film that could’ve benefitted from at least one minute of added footage. At least a few extra breaths to work the audience through a denouement or reflect on the previous 80+ minutes. Instead it feels like missed the last step going down a staircase. You don’t fall over, but you’re jolted. Maybe that’s alright.
I suppose, though, since the ending suggests that Skip/Widmark is opening up and connecting to another person instead of going it alone in this cold, dark world, then maybe this is the “proper” conclusion to the story. It just needs a little bridge from the final punch to the final scene. A ruminatory moment that helps the ending coalesce in your brain sometime before the middle of writing a lengthy blog piece 3 days later…
On the other hand, flash forward 62 years to 2015’s THE LOBSTER, a film with a stunning, definitely not crowd pleasing, ending. Does our protagonist, David (Colin Farrell), get the girl? Does he fall into the structures of polite society? Does he rebel once more? Is he gutless, is he brave, is there any way to determine which is which? Uh… Well, the filmmaker gives you an almost uncomfortably long time to ruminate on the ambiguity.
THE LOBSTER is vivid, yet not nearly as economical as PICKUP. Lanthimos has things on his mind, ideas and concerns about modern relationships and society, and he wants you to ponder them with him. It’s a movie to contemplate. Fuller wants to pin you down to your seat from the opening scene and then eject your ass when it’s over. Contemplation is secondary and optional.
But it’s not the mere presence of ambiguity in THE LOBSTER’s ending that makes it work. It’s not a difficult thing to not give your audience the answers at the end. Not writing a definitive end to a story is dully simple. The difficult thing is to not make an ambiguous ending into an annoying-as-hell ending.
THE LOBSTER pulls this off with a virtuoso final shot.
To bring you up to speed, dear reader, and to totally spoil the movie for you, here’s a thumbnail plot:
David, our hero, lives in a society in The City where single people are given 45 days to find an acceptable mate or else they’re turned into an animal of their choice. Society dictates that you choose a mate based on a shared traits–usually a physical defect. Limpers go with limpers, lispers go with lispers, and the bloody-nosed shall live together in perfect bliss.
David tries to follow these rules by faking a romance with a woman whose defining trait a cold and ruthless and dangerous lack of empathy. David emulates this trait with tragic consequences. So he runs away and hides in the woods with other “loners”–a group that has their own rigid and stultifying societal structure. He falls in love, for real, with a woman played by Rachel Weisz. She’s given the evocative name of Short-Sighted Woman. They plan to escape together.
But love is verboten in the loner society, so the leader of this group has Rachel Wesiz blinded (!) as a punishment. David and Rachel Weisz escape this group as well, and take a pitstop at a diner on the edge of The City. Here, David must decide whether he’s going to blind himself so he can make it official by sharing a trait with Rachel Weisz. He goes to the bathroom to stab his eyes out and is deciding what to do when we–
CUT TO RACHEL WEISZ! for the final shot of the film.
She’s alone in the diner booth, waiting for David to come back from the bathroom. The question is obvious–will he blind himself or not?
Now, just that question, on it’s own, is annoyingly ambiguous. But it’s the construction of this final shot that makes it work, that makes you think, that gives you time and just enough direction to ponder the possibilities in a satisfying way.
It’s a fairly wide shot of Rachel Weisz in the booth. I don’t know how long it goes on for–30 seconds? 90 seconds? She faces the left side of the screen, toward the bathroom, blindly of course, while we get the view out of the huge diner windows behind her.
While she sits quietly, waiting, you notice there’s a lot of traffic outside those diner windows. Construction equipment, cars–a lot of things happening. But you don’t hear much. Excellent soundproofing perhaps. At some point, while watching all this commotion, you realize that she can’t. Her character is blind. You start to get an inkling of what she misses, what David will miss if he’s blind. Not a spectacular sunset, not a great work of art, but the view of traffic outside a diner. Every day entertaining crap.
A pause.
Then we hear someone moving toward the table–is it David? Has he blinded himself and is stumbling back? Has he not blinded himself and is skulking back, guilty? What would he say in either case?!
But no. It’s just the waitress who comes to fill up her water.
Another pause.
Then, outside the window, we catch a glimpse of someone walking into the left side of the screen–is it David? For split second you wonder, is he escaping? Is he leaving her? What would happen to her if he left her, what would happen to his psyche? What wou–
Oh, it’s just a random couple walking past.
Then another pause as Rachel Weisz breathlessly waits.
Then it’s over.
Cue credits.
None of your questions are answered. But the power of the final shot is that it gives you space and motivation to wonder about those questions–to ask them in the first place and ponder what the different answers would mean. If David blinds himself is he conforming to the society he tried to escape? If he doesn’t, is he somehow betraying Rachel Weisz? Does she want him to blind himself? How in the hell would they make it into the City without either of their sight?
By holding that one final master shot for so long, and putting those little suggestive tweaks in there, Lanthimos takes you to places where an explicit answer would not. The ending doesn’t rule out any possibilities but, rather, it allows them to develop.
Whereas Fuller’s ending on PICKUP just sort of dumps you off on the curb and says, “Dust yourself off, kid, and get outtta here,” the ending to THE LOBSTER reinforces the themes of the film. It’s gutsy and lifts the rest of the film.
So there. This is the ending to this article.
FADE OUT 