(It must be tough to be Matt Damon's best buddy since Damon is in Jackson's class as an actor, IMO.)
Ready to talk about the ending?
The best thing about this movie was that it reversed the polarity of our sympathy while also deepening it. Jackson wins our hearts immediately because he is struggling to do the right thing in his daily life and with his kids. By the end of the movie, we've been shocked a few times by his outbreaks of fury. What looks like bad writing - How realistic is it that he would throw a computer monitor against a wall in a bank? Did we really need the cheap thrill of seeing him pommel with a telephone handset some taunting white guys? - turns out to be making the case for why Jackson's wife wants to move her kids 3,000 miles away. And by the end, Jackson understands this as well. He grows in self-knowledge and gains the wisdom of acceptance. Similarly (but not as effectively), Affleck gets past the overly-simple impulse to confess, instead accepting his father-in-law's advice to go to Texas, do some good for a few months, and then decide if he'd be better off in jail. The pat ending that makes everything right with a single gesture would have been disappointing in a movie that is interesting precisely because it spends 1.5 hours making a simple moral collision complex.
Fine and dandy.
But then they tacked on three scenes: Affleck reforms his father-in-law, goes to Jackson's wife's apartment and says some magic words that we don't hear, and she reunites with Jackson. In other words, everything we and Jackson spent the length of the movie learning was a lie.
The director's commentary on the DVD makes for uncomfortable listening when it hits those final scenes. The director never comes out and says "The studio made us add those scenes because audiences found the ending not upbeat enough," but he says explicitly that he's not sure that this was the right ending. Not that he "hates" the new ending. I.e., he hates it.
Every want to give a movie ending the finger?
Article comments
1 - Craig
I don't think any tacked-on ending can be nearly as bad as the "2000 years later AI ending."
If the movie ended w/Osment and the quasi-sentient teddy bear frozen in ice staring at the Coney Island Blue Fairy until their batteries ran out I would've been perfectly satisfied. But Speilberg (at least it looked like a Speilberg-ism) had to go and spackle on that "everything is better, but still not perfect in the future" bit. Totally unecessary.