Oops, I just gave away the point of this blog post in the title. I guess now you don’t have to read the rest. Ok, well let me give away the end of Bedtime Stories, the recent Disney flick starring Adam Sandler. The movie builds up a great premise and then, in characteristic Hollywood fashion, destroys it at the end for the sake of a gooey, feel-good romp.
I don’t mean to say that the movie I saw tonight had a happy ending. Please don’t misunderstand me; I love happy endings. But this film had a tortuously gleeful ending with a completely different pace and a whirlwind of notes attached as an epilogue.
For those who don’t watch TV or follow movies let me sum up the plot of Bedtime Stories. Adam Sandler (oops, “Skeeter”) is a disenchanted maintenance staffer at a Ritz-style hotel in Los Angeles. There’s a complicated back story about why he happens to stick around this place, but the important thing that the movie drills into your head about this character is that he’s fun loving and big-hearted (in an overly-stereotyped working-class sort of way) but he can’t catch a break in the big bad “real world.” Enter two adorable child actors (who do a great job with some of the clunkier dialogue and situations actually, one of the highlights): Skeeter’s niece and nephew. Their mom doesn’t let them do anything fun (take everything about Skeeter’s character and reverse it, she’s even a school principle which in this movie means that she hates all fun…right). So, put these three characters together with some movie magic that happens whenever uncle Skeeter tells a bedtime story and you have a plot right? Surprisingly, yes. Despite the zany stories, a freakish guinea pig, and the sometimes harshly drawn characters (a somewhat deranged foreigner takes the role of the clown) there is an honest charm to this film. We realize very quickly that the world of the movie is both quirky and quixotic. Sometimes the good guy wins, sometimes he loses. The “unexpected” (in child movie terms) occurs and we actually see some growth and change in the characters that stay on screen (for whatever reason Cortney Cox is given almost no role, even though she was prominent in the marketing of the film). We also learn some saddening facts about the limitations of fantasy. Skeeter can’t just snap his fingers and win a Ferrari and the girl of his dreams. The kids can’t get their dad back. Above all, the movie actually engages us in its world by making us laugh with the characters instead of just at them.
So, what happens in the third act? Like many movies that I have seen I got the feeling that a producer must have been pitched this story and thought “ok, we can work with that.” What happens is that much of the creative thought in the movie reflects the talent of the script writer and the director. But…there are breakfast cereals to sell. Something sugary and sweet just has to be inserted to insure that everyone knows that this is a “feel good film for the entire family.” Anything hurtful or at all troubling must be smoothed over by a wave of “happily ever after.” As innocent as the first part of the film is (there are brief references to parties and hot tubs but the movie’s satiric portrayal of Ms. Hilton, a character who plays an early love interest, stays PG) someone at the top of the food-chain must have thought: you know, I’m just not sure that people will like this movie. A movie with any sort of real message (as goofy as the surroundings may be) always runs that fatal risk of being misunderstood. This is why, I surmise, the third act of the movie fails. The third act fails miserably even according to standards set up by the protagonists. Rather than resolving the dilemmas of fantasy and reality we get an ending of pure, over the top, saccharine sweet fantasy. The final ten minutes of the film make Skeeter’s bedtime story fantasies look miserable by comparison. I mean c’mon. Are audiences today so jaded and hateful that they need a complete refutation of Sandler’s early line “in real life there are no happy endings”? Isn’t there some space here for creativity, for wit, for teaching kids and families that at least some element of an ending may be bittersweet? This goes beyond the stylistic problems of shifting gears at the very end of a story. Movies, like any form of entertainment, are not there just for our pleasure. Surely the bigwigs who put together films like Bedtime Stories must have gotten a college education and read some Aristotle. Drama should free us, not lull us into passivity–giving us just enough inoffensive fluff that we are willing to fork over money for the DVD and a trip to Disneyland. I’m not saying that I expect every movie to be “artsy” and “sophisticated.” False sophistication is just as bad as earnest mindlessness. I am saying that I expect every movie to live up to its premise of delivering heart and not just gratifying the audience in a third act folly.