Anne here, having a bit of a rant. There's a strange thing about happy endings — a lot of people think they're rubbish. Not serious. Not real. Unrealistic. Not worth reading. Or watching.
Me, I love happy endings in books and movies. And I get grumpy when I think books or movies are needlessly miserable at the end. Most of my comments below should be preceded by Spoiler Alerts. I'll highlight the book or film titles in bold so you can be warned.
The belief seems to be that tragic or unhappy endings are “real” and therefore “worthy” while happy endings are an easy cop-out. As I writer I can say that it’s a LOT easier to write a story where you make people care about a character, and then kill them off for dramatic effect, leaving the reader gutted. It’s much harder (in my view) to craft a believable happy ending. Nevertheless, the attitude that tragic is better, nobler, cleverer persists.
I remember when I was a kid reading Henry Treece's The Children's Crusade. Boy, was that ever a sad ending. It was a story about the religious crusade made by children in 1212, where hundreds of children left their homes to join a crusade, believing they were sent by Jesus, and that their innocence and righteousness would convert the Muslims. It ended very badly. Many of the children starved and died along the way, some (the lucky ones) returned home, and others were sold into slavery, believing the ships they sailed in were taking them to the Holy Land, instead of which they went straight to the slave markets.
I could cope with that kind of a tragic ending — it was history, after all — and there were important lessons to be learned, though for years I fretted about those children.
But there's a lot of fiction where people die and bad things happen for effect, and a book or a film ends badly simply because the writer thinks it will make for a better, more dramatic ending. Or they think it's "more realistic" — as if happy endings are unrealistic. I say, who needs gloomy so-called "realism"? There's plenty of that in the world we live in, but there's also a lot of happy stuff, and I want us to celebrate that, not push it under the carpet and call it mindless fluff. As people so often do.
There was a film I watched once, called CRUSH, with Andie MacDowell. She was a middle aged school headmistress who met up with a much younger former student (played by Kenny Doughty) and had an affair. He's a breath of fresh air in her life, and she has a chance to change her humdrum, routine life. But she doesn't have the courage, and when he is tragically killed in a random stupid accident, she ends up back in her rut, keeping the whole affair a dirty little secret, only she has a baby now.
So, by the end, nothing had been learned, and she didn't change at all.
That movie so frustrated me that I bought the DVD and mentally rewrote the ending. Instead of him being killed, I would have had him badly injured. And the accident makes her realize what he means to her and how he's changed her life. Of course he would get better, only now he's not alone — she's with him, facing the world with courage, and they're bringing up their baby together. And thus, instead of a pointless tragedy, it would make it a happy ending, in which she's learned something important — that an age discrepancy doesn’t matter if you can be happy together.
The film and novel, The Dressmaker, with Kate Winslett also bugged me and once again I mentally rewrote the ending. There was no reason why the romantic lead hero needed to die pointlessly in a really dumb stunt, no reason I could see for the protagonist to revenge herself on the whole town, let alone set it on fire. It was all there (as far as I could see) for the drama. And it was presented as a triumphal ending, but all I could see was pointless vandalism, and what about the people whose homes were burning — how did they deserve that?
Then there's the movie The Bookshop (with Bill Nighy.) Wonderful photography, fabulous acting — I love Bill Nighy—a gorgeous location — and then, (in my opinion) a pointlessly gloomy ending.
The film is all about a youngish widow starting a bookshop in a small island town, and how the first lady of the local community vehemently opposed her. But the bookseller persists, and more and more people come to buy books. And it's all looking so hopeful, and right (ie books) is about to triumph — and then? It all ends gloomily and hopelessly — the shop is closed, the widow has lost all her money, and the supposed "triumph" at the very end is when the little girl sets the shop on fire. Why end on such a negative note? Because it was "realistic"?
Bah humbug, say I. People could have come out of that movie feeling uplifted and happy but no, they had to come out feeling crushed and thinking "what was the point of that?" And the message for life was "don't even bother trying." And when did pointless revenge become triumphal?
Contrast the audience response to that of the people coming out of cinemas after watching the The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, all smiles and happy discussion — a reinforcement that goodness can triumph and that happy endings are possible. A link to the movie is here, and the book (which is wonderful) is here.
Then again, the ending of the French movie, Two is a Family (with the wonderful Omar Sy), was perfect. It's a brilliant comedy, and yet when I watched it in the cinema and the lights came on after it ended, more than half the audience was in tears.
And despite the tears — or maybe because of them, the audience loved it. It's a wonderful movie and the end, though sad, felt entirely right. Which is what I meant at the start when I was ranting about needlessly sad endings — some sad endings are just right.
I hate this belief that negative and miserable endings are more "realistic" than happy endings. As far as I'm concerned, if it's a choice between coming out of a cinema (or closing a book) feeling gutted and gloomy, or coming out feeling uplifted and positive — well, you know which I'd choose.
What about you — have you seen any of these movies or read the books? Do you agree or disagree with my view of them? Are there other endings that you think are pointlessly miserable? Do you mentally rewrite the endings of some stories?