Wonderful movie with a third-act botch

erikpsmith

I guess you could say this contains a partial spoiler.

* * * * I'm a little perplexed at the low ratings most folks seem to give this movie. I think it's because people tend to look at movies as a total product. Me, I'm the kind of guy who can appreciate a classic car, and overlook the rust spots.

That's kind of where we are on this movie -- a movie that hits on seven out of eight cylinders. The problem is that romantic comedy is the most difficult of genres, and for most folks, it has to hit on all eight to "work." Viewers think about their feelings; they don't analyze a romantic movie in an intellectual way, and if something doesn't quite work, they leave the theater feeling dissatisfied without knowing exactly why.

This movie has so much going for it -- a good premise, clever banter, believable characters, and a romance that doesn't seem forced. And for me, there's a double appeal -- I've worked in the press/political world, and all I can say is I can tell the writers must have been there, too.

Was it miscast? Was it shallow? Was the dialog unrealistic? Was everyone too cute? Was the "strange bedfellows" premise beyond belief? Naah. None of that.

The problem is the third act. I don't want to give away too much, but we have a scene in a bar in which Michael Keaton is given some interesting information, and he has a choice to make. Now, the movie might have spun in a half-dozen interesting directions from this point -- first time I saw it, I was half-sitting up in my chair, once I recognized where the whole thing was leading. I couldn't tell quite where it was going, but I knew it was going to be mighty interesting. There was plenty of dramatic potential, the sort you always need at the start of the third act in a comedy, to make the ending seem a happy relief. The way it spun out in my mind, I suppose the movie would have gone on for another five or six scenes.

But here's the trouble -- the next scene is the big climax at the balloon fiesta, and the producers settled for an ending so simple, so dishonest, so downright cheap, that I'm sure it's the thing that left the bad taste in most moviegoers' mouths. Up to this point the movie was a clever comedy of words and ideas and romance; suddenly we got slapstick.

How on earth could something like this have happened? How could writers who had done such a good job up to this point have failed so miserably at the climax? My guess is that they didn't -- my guess is that someone with a complete lack of understanding of the material took a movie with a complex, adult, and somewhat ambiguous ending, something in which there were no heroes and no villains, and decided to "improve" it.

Or maybe a different ending was shot, and it didn't test well in Pomona, and the studio tried another approach.

Or maybe the studio decided to save a little money by cutting 15 minutes out of the script.

But I suspect some big-time tinkering here -- something that basically spoiled the movie for most viewers, and turned a potential classic into a bomb.

Wouldn't it be cool if another ending was shot -- and if someday a "director's cut" might be made available? There was so much "right" about this movie, I hated to see it spoiled by a botched last couple of minutes.

Erik Smith Olympia, Wash.

score 8/10

erikpsmith 7 June 2009

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2077816/