Ever see The Paper?
This 1994 Ron Howard film focuses on a big-city paper where the staff are struggling to cope with personal crises while also covering a controversial shooting incident. Among the personal crises, the most interesting is Marisa Tomei, a former reporter married to editor Michael Keaton and expecting their first baby.
Tomei’s convinced that for all Keaton’s talk of being a co-parent, when the baby comes she’ll be stuck at home parenting while he puts in late nights at his job. It’s a valid fear: It’s quite obvious Keaton has difficulty putting her ahead of the paper on a daily basis. As Tomei comments at one point, he’s telling himself that in a crisis, he’d be there—but that’s an excuse for letting the non-crisis time with her go by ignored.
But it all ends OK. She has a baby, they coo over her in Tomei’s hospital bed and the camera fades out—so that proves everything got resolved, even if Keaton never showed any signs he was going to change, right?
I like happy endings. But endings that are only happy because the writers ignored the problems don’t count.
1982’s Victor Victoria is another example. In the course of the film, American mobster James Garner falls for Julie Andrews, who’s become a star of the 1920s Paris stage by posing as “Victor,” the world’s greatest female impersonator. Trouble is, she loves the independence posing as a man gives her, and doesn’t want to give it up, which means the city assumes Garner, when he’s with her, is another gay man (the attitudes of the main characters, I note, are much more 1980s than 1920s).
The solution? While Robert Preston takes over as Victor (don’t ask why), Andrews shows up dressed as a girl in the audience and sits next to Garner. The couple’s together, the ending’s happy—never mind that they never resolved any of Andrews’ issues, even at the “I have a man—I don’t need a career!” level of sexism.
Lost‘s final season had some of the same problems (I’ve discussed that here): We’re shown a happy ending in a parallel world, but it turns out to be the afterlife, so it doesn’t really resolve any of the personal issues that the characters had been grappled with (Your dead and God loves you is not a resolution).
It’s not necessary that writers resolve character conflicts of course. Many good stories have been written or performed in which some of the issues remain hanging at the end of the film, or they’re simply touched on as we pass through these characters lives. But that’s completely different from telling us the conflicts have been resolved, even though we don’t see any evidence of it.
Even in fairy tales, Happily Ever After isn’t that easy.
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