Nothing much happens: Sometimes that’s good

I first realized the appeal of watching movies without a big finish when I caught Requiem for a Dream (2000) four or five years ago.
Not that the movie lacks a big finish: The story of Jared Leto, Ellen Burstyn and Jennifer Connelly all sliding into a hell of drug addiction by various roots pulls out all the stops—in fact, the fates of the various protagonists were so heavy-handed, I found it way overdone, despite the excellent performances.
But the same weekend, I caught The Panic in Needle Park (1971) which takes the opposite approach: It’s completely obvious by the end of the film that pusher/user Al Pacino and his girlfriend are taking a long walk on a very short pier, but they’re still keeping all the balls in the air—pretty much—at the end of the film.
That’s unusual for a drug film; invariably, they either end with the hero Paying the Price, or cleaning up his act.
The same feeling hit me watching John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence (1974), in which Peter Falk stubbornly insists that his mentally ill wife (Gena Rowlands) is fine, perfectly fine, life can go on just like before—and again, at the end, it is continuing, though very precariously.
This weekend I had the same reaction to King Rat (1965), based on a James Clavell novel about life in a WW II POW camp. It’s a movie where everyone is slightly nuts, slightly corrupt or both, and the alpha of corruption is slick, smug black marketeer George Segal, the guy who always has a good uniform and lots of food.
While Segal is certainly an anti-hero, it struck me he’s just as much an anti-villain. He’s selfish (his plans for surviving if the Japanese decide to execute the inmates don’t include anyone but himself and his toadies), but he doesn’t attempt to rat anyone out to the Japanese (several inmates have contraband radios), nor does anyone else. He and his campmates (James Fox, Denholm Elliott, John Mills, Patrick O’Neal) are corrupt but not totally so.
And what really stuck out is that at the end, when the camp is liberated … nothing happens. No punishment. No rough justice. Segal has to resume his role as an ordinary enlisted man in the regular Army, no longer an alpha or anything special and that’s the total of his punishment.
I suppose movies like these are a variation of “slice of life,” the stories that just take a look at a relatively ordinary day in a bustling police station, or a suburban party (or my own story Learning Curve, about one week in a teacher’s life). But these have more punch because they’re set in situations where I expected a standard payoff—justice served, doom descending—and I didn’t get one.
Now that I know I do, I’ll have to keep an eye out for more of these. Though I don’t think there’s a listing for “movies where everything’s quiet and there are no big exciting moments” will be a category on Netflix any time soon.