Whether you like Limbo (1999) or not depends on the last few seconds of the movie. Joe (David Strathairn), an Alaskan handyman still suffering from a tragic boating accident, and Donna (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), a travelling lounge singer with bad taste in men, and her troubled teenaged daughter, Noelle (Vanessa Martinez), are stranded on a remote Alaskan island with winter closing in. Will the airplane approaching bring rescue or people to kill them because they witnessed a murder? The screen goes blank as a plane engine roars on the sound track. The end. To like the movie, you must do some fancy footwork to relate the ending to the rest of the movie. The best dance would claim that Joe, Donna, and Noelle are all in limbo in their own ways and that, therefore, an inconclusive ending is appropriate. But the underlying logic of this dance bears little scrutiny. Must suspenseful movies, for example, end suspensefully? Must action flicks end with more action? No. The movies may be full of suspense or action, but they have a story which has an unsuspenseful or quiet conclusion. If you insist on more fancy footwork, you can claim, rightly, that not all movies have to follow a conventional pattern. But what is gained by refusing to conclude the movie? For one, you leave people thinking—rescue or death? Because the movie does not give us enough information to tip the scales one way or the other, it becomes an ink blot test for the viewer. You could just look at an ink blot. For another, refusing to conclude the movie throws the viewer’s attention back on the rest of the movie to gain additional insight. But because director, screenwriter, and editor John Sayles takes a leisurely two hours before he suddenly cuts the film, most viewers should be able to get everything from the film as they go along. For another, ending the movie in mid-propeller spin makes some viewers think you’ve simply copped out. Interestingly, as I watched the movie I thought a couple of times, “How will he ever conclude this so that it is in keeping with the rest of the movie?” It never occurred to me that he could simply stop. To me, it was a cop-out.
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