Where's My Happy Ending?

Architecture
Originally uploaded by The Other Pete

Or my sad one or any ending, for that matter?

Usually, when I start working on a new screenplay, I try to immerse myself in movies as much as possible, in the hopes that it will help get me in the right frame of mind. A while back, I had been trying to set aside Saturdays to just sit and watch movies. And while the writing has come to a bit of an impasse, I still turn it over on my head now and then.

After all that time watching mostly independent movies and now with the uproar over the Sopranos series finale, I've realized something very important – independent screenwriters and directors have absolutely no idea how to end a story anymore. It's almost as if they're so intent on creating "realistic depictions of life" that they've completely lost sight of the fact that movies are only entertaining if they're somehow different from life.

Case in point – Junebug. This movie was hailed as a brilliant feature film, from a screenplay by playwright Angus McLachlan, and even won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance for Amy Adams' portrayal of Ashley. While I will admit that Adams' performance was excellent, I wonder how much of it had to do with the fact that she was the only character with a pulse in the entire film. With the possible exception of Embeth Davidtz's Madeleine, everyone else seemed to wander about, mumbling or staring or just killing time.

But that's really neither here nor there. Because were it not for the completely lackluster ending, all that might have been bearable, if not welcome. Instead, I was left with an overwhelming sense of "so what?" I still don't see any reason for that story to have been committed to film, as it wasn't a story. But for the one major event that takes place, the whole 104-minute span was completely pointless, especially if one expects to get any kind of catharsis from the characters.

Now much is made of not giving the audience too many answers, out of respect for their intelligence. Nonsense. That's just an abdication of the author's reponsibility to pose a question and answer it in a satisfying, or at least understandable, way.

Independent film has recently begun taking its lead from the worst of short fiction trends – that of depicting a series of events without context, with the expectation that merely committing those events to paper (or film) automatically imbues them with enough meaning to make it worth experiencing. With independent film, there's the added dimension of the opposition with the studio system. Anything studios do, indies won't. It doesn't matter what it is, they just won't do it. And that clearly extends to providing a sense of closure or catharsis or anything that will make a viewer feel that he's actually seen something of real importance rather than some writer/director's vanity project.

So let me offer this one tip – if you're going to write ten minutes of crap at any point in your script, it would be a damn good idea to make sure it's not the last ten minutes. Because that's what the audience remembers. And overlooking that has ruined a number of otherwise excellent independent features for me.