Your favorite ambiguous endings

Was Memento's ending ambiguous? I can't remember.

 

Boyhood. Have you seen it? If not, put down the laptop and do it right now.

It's my favorite new pop-culture of the year, and its whole shtick is ambiguity - you can't really be driving toward a specific revelation when you're filming over the course of 12 years with actors who are growing up and out while the world changes around them. What you're driving toward, in this case, is a portrait of the ambiguity of growing up.

Giving away the ending isn't giving away much. A smart kid gets to college and does some mushrooms with a girl who's nice to him and some new friends who make him feel easy. That could describe Steve Jobs, the Son of Sam or Michael Phelps. That's the beauty of the ending - you get to see this real kid grow up, strong moral center, socially awkward, disdain for heavy substance abuse, a taste for substances. You turn that kid loose in the desert with a pretty girl, apparently good-hearted friends and a bag of shrooms? You tell me how that's going to end up.

 

Hell of a show, that one. Personally, I bet she shot him.

 

Pretty much every Coen Bros. movie. Hell, they start ambiguously and end the same way.

 

Spike Lee has the same problem. Apologists will say that his films' terrible endings are intentional. But I think it's just that while he knows how to start an argument, he doesn't know how to finish one.

 

Complete difference of opinion on the movie, and the ambiguity just struck me as how insufferably ordinary the kid's life was, pretty much like most of our lives. Lot of cliches -- stepdads bad, BAD! -- and it all hit me as a film-school experiment with some name actors. The gimmick (the "conceit," they call it in Hollywoodland) of seeing a real kid/semi-actor grow up within the framework of a fictional story was all it had going for it. Big-time meh.

 

Always figured that was just a glimpse into Tom Hanks' character's new lease on life. If he learned anything while on that island, it was that there's a lot of fish in the sea.