This is How it Ends: Five Great Movie Finales
What makes a great movie ending? Perhaps its the same thing that the late critic Harold Bloom argued made great poetry: a feeling of inevitability. By this, Bloom didn’t mean predictability so much as a sense of cosmic fulfillment on the part of the reader — a deeply-felt recognition that things could not have possibly been said any better, or any other way. I would humbly argue that the five films below meet that criteria, and I hope to explain why.
A note that what follows is definitely not a list of the “top five greatest movie endings ever,” but merely five of my favorites. This will be an ongoing feature, so the list will expand as time goes by.
Speaking of which…
Casablanca
“We’ll always have Paris.”
Casablanca is a movie so ingrained in the popular imagination that it’s become part of our collective memory, a cultural touchstone whose most iconic moments are instantly recognizable by almost everyone — even those who’ve never bothered to watch the film at all. This is understandable — Casablanca remains every bit as well-acted, sharply written, and emotionally affecting as it was in 1942 — but its lasting appeal has also proven something of a double-edged sword. In many ways this most classic of classic American movies is a victim of its own success, with that same deathless ubiquity — in the form of countless critical examinations, endless plaudits, and tired parodies — threatening to overwhelm appreciation of the film as a film.
It’s a testament to just how good the movie is that this obscuring fog of commentary instantly vanishes the moment we settle in for a re-watch — the outside world, with all its burdensome opinions, simply melts away. In its place is an unequivocal masterpiece: Morocco during the bleakest years of World War Two — a multicultural port filled with occupiers, petty crooks, and desperate refugees — is home to world-weary American expat Rick Blaine, owner of a popular saloon that attracts every strata of Moroccan society. Things are moving along smoothly enough for Rick, until Ilsa Lund, the love of his life — and the woman who broke his heart — walks through the doors with husband Victor Laszlo on her arm.
What follows is one of the greatest love stories ever put to screen, largely because it lacks love’s insularity. The famous moment when Rick lets Ilsa go isn’t only the story of a man’s resigned love for a woman. His sacrifice — of himself and of his own potential future — is as much for everyone else as it is for her. As he himself puts it, “the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” This is what makes Rick not just wise, but noble — he not only recognizes that the world does not turn on his happiness, he acts on this fact, accepting that the best thing for others might be the worst thing for himself.
These are dark undercurrents, and Casablanca, for all its tenderness, never averts its eyes from the reality of its amoral universe. Its characters exist in a world moved by fate, not desire, and they do not have the luxury of romance. In this, the movie owes something to Film Noir. Rick, in particular, feels like a character ripped from the pages of Black Mask and deposited into a love story (Bogart had, up until Casablanca, almost exclusively portrayed “heavies” on-screen) and it proves a perfect fit. Casablanca is, after all, a seedy place: where everyone must play their cards close to their chest, where language itself is both a lance and a shield, where love and heroism are potential weaknesses, best left off the table. We’re never sure if we can trust Rick — of just where his allegiances lie — but in time we come to realize that he may be the only man we can trust, because he is the only man who can navigate Casablanca’s dark and twisting moral landscape without being corrupted by it.
Rick leads Ilsa and Laszlo out of that dark maze, and he does it in true Noir style — with one last double-cross. He leads Ilsa to believe that he will be going away with her, when in reality he intends to put her on a plane with Laszlo. There is a whiff of sexism in all of this — what right does Blaine, or Laszlo, have to dictate what Ilsa should do with her life? — but one senses that all of the characters know that this is the right choice; the only choice that their unfortunate circumstances will allow.
But this is hardly a cold, moral calculation either, of course. The human question that Casablanca poses is a disarmingly simple one: if you could see into your future — if you knew how love would end — would you have bothered at all? For a large part of Rick Blaine’s life, that answer was a decided “no.” But in his final moments with Ilsa, he realizes a truth that saves him: love may be fleeting, but its worth should never be measured in years.
Avengers: Endgame
“On your left.”
The Marvel films present something of a critical dilemma to the discerning movie-lover: they’re obviously popular (having collectively grossed over seven billion dollars worldwide as of this writing) almost always entertaining, and have occasionally even transcended their own limited ambitions to produce honest-to-god films (see the occasionally goofy but mostly excellent Captain America: The Winter Soldier, for instance).
But they also cynically distilled the things we love about movies (and particularly big-budget action movies) down to a staid formula of mostly-pleasant mediocrity that was grand but hollow — “closer to theme parks” than films, as Martin Scorsese lamented in an “old man yells at cloud” moment in the New York Times op-ed pages a few years ago.
Scorsese must have felt something of the confusion we all feel. At their worst, the Marvel movies have all the depth of Siri or Alexa — they understand the language (in this case, of film) but not its import. An explosion here, a fist-fight there, sprinkle in a few well-timed one-liners, maybe add a dash of existential danger, and viola: the money rolls in as the brain cells die.
And yet, when the formula works, it really works. Witness the final battle sequence of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, the silly, oftentimes thrilling, conclusion to the first decade of Marvel’s cinematic universe.
Here, the Mt. Rushmore of Marvel’s original “phase one” era — Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor — face off once more against the nigh-invincible Thanos, the purple-people-snapping Titan who successfully wiped out half of all life in the previous film, including many of our beloved heroes.
And, once again, they’re getting creamed. With Iron Man and Thor on the ropes, Captain America stands alone against Thanos and his multitudinous armies, and — in a rousing moment — prepares to assault them alone, nobly following his sense of duty to near-certain death.
But such a sacrifice won’t be necessary. Thanks to some shenanigans with the all-powerful infinity stones (you’re going to need to watch the movies for that explanation) the entire Marvel universe — alive again — comes pouring forth from inter-dimensional portals, rallying to the Captain’s side and smashing Thanos in a teenage Götterdämmerung that proves to be a curtain-lifter nowhere near as exciting as its warm-up.
But no matter: that warm-up is truly awe-inspiring, and must stand as one of the most unique moments in the history of cinema, one that expertly draws on eleven years and twenty-three(!) films to imbue what, on-screen, is nothing more than another CG free-for-all into something else entirely: a moment rich with history, pathos, and memory.
2001: A Space Odyssey
“I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave.”
Half-a-century after its release, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey remains one of the most visually lyrical films ever made, a waking dream that expertly melds the vitalizing power of the movies with the boundless emotional landscapes of music. There’s a very Kubrickian remoteness to the whole thing, in the way it eschews emotional complexity in favor of grandeur, precise declarations in favor of cryptic ambiguity. Yet unlike many of Kubrick’s other masterpieces, 2001 — somewhat ironically for a movie not even set on Earth — still manages to feel deeply human. Following Chekhov’s dictum, it does what great art is supposed to do: it asks important questions, and answers none.
To talk about the finale of 2001 then, is, in a sense, to talk to yourself. The movie’s ending — from HAL’s termination (or is it murder?) to beyond the infinite — is one of film’s artistic pinnacles, and also one of its most subjective, with all the trappings of a Socratic prompt. It so successfully walks the line between revelation and obscurity that it transforms what had, up until that point, been a somewhat prosaic science-fiction narrative into a deeply personal, almost mystical, experience. It invites you in, shows you around, and listens.
If you’ve read Arthur C. Clarke’s novel on which the film is based (or have seen 2001’s near-forgotten sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact) much of the details of just what, exactly, happens to astronaut Dave Bowman after he encounters the monolith are dutifully explained. But Kubrick is a smart enough filmmaker to know that an answer — even the most grandiose one — is an ending, a kind of death of the imagination. Mystery is what we really crave. As such he takes care to explain only the bare minimum in his version of events — just enough to orient us to this strange new world, and no more. With its sparse, perfunctory dialogue, 2001 at times feels like a silent film, almost as if Kubrick were contemptuous of language, of its tendency to reduce true wonder to an ersatz copy, to imprison it within the bounds of our limited intellects.
Kubrick knew, of course, that the potency of 2001 would lie in its striking images, in its vast empty spaces, in its ethereal quiet. And what makes the final moments of 2001 different — what makes them so qualitatively superior to other films — are their explosive hush. Perhaps no other filmmaker but Stanley Kubrick could have crafted such an end sequence, one that abandons the majestic but muted structure of the previous two hours in favor of a prolonged psychedelic meditation that breaks as cleanly with genre conventions as astronaut Bowman does with reality. It is within this wordless phantasmagoria that Kubrick’s intentions become clear: he was never all that interested in telling a conventional science-fiction story, of scrutinizing the minutiae of a near human future. He was taking an even longer view — one that examined not just what it means to be human, but what it might mean to leave one’s humanity behind.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
“We named the dog Indiana.”
The Indiana Jones films were always intended as light fare — winking nods to the action-adventure movie serials of yesteryear. But with Last Crusade, the final (for a while, at least) Indiana Jones adventure, things took a turn towards — gasp! — emotional complexity, with Indiana teaming up with his estranged father, the bookish Professor Henry Jones (Sean Connery, here playing hilariously against type) to save yet another quasi-historical McGuffin from the clutches of evil.
While the film never verges into Merchant Ivory territory (there’s still plenty of swashbuckling and Nazi punching) the Jones boys’ fraught relationship forms the human core of Last Crusade, and in the process transforms everyone’s favorite globe-trotting archaeologist from an action figure into something approaching flesh-and-blood — he’s now a man with a past, a family, and major daddy issues. It’s a surprising pivot that proves wildly successful, enlarging an iconic character while injecting genuine sentiment into the franchise, and doing it all without ever devolving into weepy sentimentality.
It also shrewdly capitalizes on the peerless charm of its star, acknowledging that Harrison Ford’s blockbuster success was never about rippling muscles or cheesy one-liners so much as it was about his ability to portray a heroic vulnerability; deeply felt but not debilitating, sensitive but not effete. His was a sense of fear that seemed propulsive, reactive, never impotent — an earthbound bravery that acknowledged mortality without surrendering to it. It was a fundamental shift in the way that male action heroes could behave, and it proved far-reaching, creating a new blueprint for how Hollywood portrayed tough guy masculinity on-screen. Just witness Indiana’s expression of child-like contentment while embraced by his usually cold, distant dad — Flash Gordon this is definitely not.
It’s that father-son relationship that makes the ending of Last Crusade work so well. Not only does it add a layer of poignancy to the prospect of saying our final goodbyes to these characters, but in giving Indiana a genuine family connection in the form of Henry Jones, we set up a scene that wouldn’t have been possible in the first two films: one that both sums up and comments on the entire franchise.
In it, Indiana is dangling over a deep chasm, one hand desperately gripped by his father, the other mere inches away from grasping perhaps the greatest of all artifacts: the Holy Grail. If he persists in reaching for the Grail, he will surely fall — only by giving his other hand to Henry can he be saved. A choice has to be made: safety or the treasure — Indy can’t have both.
In the end he chooses wisely, at last understanding as the elder Jones (who has himself spent his entire life searching for the Grail) gently extols him to “let it go.” He does — they both do — and it’s a powerful renunciation of material objects by two men obsessed with them; a conscious turning away from endless questing in favor of human connection.
The final scene, which finds the core group from the original trilogy on horseback, safely outside the Grail’s final resting place, is a pithy summation of everything that made these films so great. It’s briefly spiritual (Henry Jones’s moment of closure) refreshingly unpretentious and funny (the amusing story of how Indiana got his name) and grandly heroic, thanks in large part to John Williams’s iconic score, an essential character in its own right.
The closing image of the group riding off into the sunset is a farewell so pitch-perfect that it alone made the belated fourth film — Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — feel like something of an affront. Sadly, that misstep hasn’t stopped Disney from foisting yet another ill-advised sequel upon us, but fans know they needn’t bother: The classic trilogy ends here, in touching, impeccable style.
Goodfellas
“I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.”
Goodfellas is a movie to salivate over. Literally. Characters in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 mob classic always seem to be eating — and eating well — amidst all the gore. Pasta is served alongside brutal stabbings, marinara sauce is intermingled with pools of blood, tomatoes and peppers are as common as bullet wounds and beatings. This isn’t just window-dressing, or a cinematic homage to the rich delights of Italian cuisine: food in Goodfellas — the simple act of sharing a meal — represents to its vicious mafiosos the same thing it does to the rest of us: affluence, safety, home, family. No other film utilizes the social subtext of gastronomy to such delicious effect. That’s why it’s no surprise that turncoat gangster Henry Hill’s final lament is not for his life of crime, but for the lack of decent Italian food in the suburban wasteland that the witness protection program has exiled him to. “Right after I got here, I ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce and got egg noodles with ketchup,” he whines. For Henry, the lack of good food isn’t just an inconvenience: it’s a signal of everything he’s given up to stay alive. Being a snitch is one thing, but losing your family is even worse.
And family is what Goodfellas is all about. Part of the attraction of mob movies (and particularly those that examine its inner workings) must be the attraction of the real-life mob itself: it duplicates the structure of family on an epic scale, and strengthens it with a strict code; a twisted morality not wholly unrecognizable (or undesirable) to those looking on. Members within the inner circle are protected and supported by a powerful father-figure, a man who dispenses justice with a word, and without delay. For the price of their unquestioning loyalty, a gangster is given not just money, but with it protection from a mean world: there is always someone in your corner, always someone to turn to for help. You’re granted power, too: the wolf at the door is on your leash, the gun is in your hand. Safety is not dependent on the law, impersonal and sluggish, prosperity is not dependent on the indentured servitude of a boring day job. Society doesn’t care about you, the mob says, but your family does. It’s love with teeth.
And it’s a lie. While The Godfather took a top-down approach to the mob, a view that gave it a kind of Shakespearean majesty, Goodfellas looks at life near the bottom, far from the upper echelons of the Mafia’s decision makers. These are not troubled kings or reluctant princes, plotting Machiavellian moves or concocting intricate money-making schemes; these are cigarette thieves, hitmen, dope-dealers — small-time guys trying to make their way in the world. Telling this side of the story is what makes Goodfellas the richer film: it doesn’t shy away from acknowledging just why such an ostensibly violent lifestyle might appeal: it’s a way out of poverty, a way to respect, a way to belonging, a way — dare we admit it — to fun and freedom.
But it also takes care to show just where such a life inevitably leads: dead, in jail, or — perhaps worst of all — out of the game, reduced to suburban limbo, an average nobody. That’s what makes Henry Hill’s ultimate fate so affecting, and so appropriate. He loved the mob. It gave him what a regular life never could: money, power, respect. Yet in the end, the vicious circle becomes clear: all of those things are taken away by the same venality that had once supplied them.
It’s a punishment worse than any jail cell; worse, even, than a shot in the back. The only thing Henry Hill ever really cared about was himself — of the image he had made of himself. But Henry Hill the gangster was always a con, an empty vessel created by violence and propped up with material baubles. Now, stripped of all his ill-gotten gains, only the man is left — and we’re left with the distinct impression that he won’t be enough.
