...happily ever after

I watched the final episode of The Starter Wife, and cheered the ending as Molly realizes she needs to stand on her own two feet, to find herself again, rather than her stereotype. She publishes the book, dedicates it to the special people in her life, and then ruins the entire mini-series by asking, “Has anyone seen Sam?”

Life isn’t pretty, it isn’t neat, and it seldom ends happily ever after. Most of us come to the day when we have to face who we are and who we should be, and we either have the strength to accept the need to change or we wind down to our inevitable end, chugging a chain of should woulda coulda cars behind our caboose. We all die with loose ends that someone else has to gather into a ball and distribute or dispose. It’s the human condition, it is what is, and no one has the right to try to pretty it up to fit their perception of life’s reality.

My son challenged me to watch two videos, the director’s cut of Payback, a Mel Gibson film, and the Will Ferrell film, Stranger Than Fiction. He wants to know what I think, so here ‘tis.

Stranger Than Fiction fixes life, and that isn’t what life is all about. Harold read the book and he knew how important it was for his life to be what it is, not what he wants it to be, but that’s not the way the film ends. The only reason to watch this entire film is to get to the ending, and the ending is a huge disappointment. I feel cheated and do not recommend this film as it’s tedious to get to the contrivance and not worth the journey.

Payback, the director’s cut, is a difficult film to watch because it is harsh, it is violent, it is brutal—but it is honest, and, as hard as it was to do, I wanted to watch it. It is dark, both in tone and in cinematography, and it explores depths of depravity that I have never experienced, but somehow know exist. The film reminds me of another one of my favorites, Viggo Mortenson in A History of Violence.

Mel Gibson’s performance as Porter is terrifying as he becomes the crook who justifies the need to “pay back” the people who stole from him. He knows that his wife shot him in the back and left him for dead, but in this remake, the audience doesn’t know much of the back story, so his brutality toward her is shocking. As the story exposes layer upon layer of the plot, the viewer is drawn into the chain of events almost as an unwilling participant, and Porter, the central character, somehow becomes a “good guy” in a world of bad, worse, and worst characters.

I also watched the feature about remaking the film released in the theater and applauded the writer’s refusal to participate in the remake of his first version to be more commercial. He opted out of ‘fixing’ the film for the consumer, believing that his original vision was what needed to be released. He willingly, however, spent many weeks recapturing the film he thought he made the first time, and is pleased with the product currently on the shelves, even though it became a third version, rather than a remake of the first finished film.

It doesn’t matter what I watch, but it does matter that it’s honest and real, even when it’s fiction. "Just drive, baby, just drive."