A Twisted Ending

After watching The Player, I have to say that I was creeped out and unhappy with the ending. Although I am a sucker for the happy endings to prevail in movies, I was especially rooting against the anti-hero, Griffin Mill, in this particular film. In fact, this movie has a consistent theme of the movie-making business and happy versus unhappy endings. Oh, the irony.

As the movie came to a close, I found myself feeling irritated, confused, and disturbed. The discussion about the movie brought a lot of different things into perspective and gave me a little more understanding as to why the ending was how it was. The movie is focused on a movie executive whose job is to listen to an endless number of writers' pitches for possible movies. After getting several threatening postcards in the mail from an unknown writer, Griffin Mill tries to hunt down his attacker. He eventually tracks down a writer and kills him, but it turns out that the writer he kills was not his attacker; thus, the threats persist. To make this movie even more twisted, Mill falls in love with the dead writer's girlfriend. And in the end, he lives happily ever after by appeasing the angry writer and getting away with murder. The fact that he gets away with murder is what bothered me. Where is the justice? What did the innocent writer die for?

Well, maybe these questions can be answered by the director's intentions of the film and film's background. After discovering that the film fits into the genre of film noir, things began to gradually become pieced together. The music beats during the dark/disturbing parts of the movie along with the twisted ending allow this fact to make more sense. Robert Altman, the director, created a theme of the movie-making business in the film. He depicted this studio business as one that was averse to risk and shallow, screwed people over, and created empty, unrealistic movies. This last point about unreality points out another theme within this movie: the battle between reality and unreality.

One important instance in the middle of the film is when Griffin Mill hears a movie pitch from two writers who want to make a film with no big stars and an unhappy, depressing ending. The studio decides to try the movie; and at the end of the film, we see that the movie opened into theaters using Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis as main characters and instead of dying, Julia Roberts gets saved. Altman is sending the audience a message that in the movie-making business, it all comes down to the story film makers want to tell versus the story they believe that audiences will want to see. Most often, unreality is what dominates in movies. Yet the fact that Altman allowed Mill to get away with murder illustrates that in reality, unhappy endings can be just as common (if not more common) than happy ones.