Romantic movies with happy blue-sky endings don’t resonate. The ones that sink into people’s souls are about love lost at such a cost. That’s the enduring thing, the special alchemy. If, say, J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson had been forced apart by fate, you’d have a movie. But they were close and pretty much inseparable their entire lives…flatline.
You’d think that somewhere in Borys Kit‘s Hollywood Reporter story somebody would have mentioned this, and perhaps commented on what I suspect is a reluctance to buy into the sad-is-better idea on the part of producers and female moviegoers. Everybody wants love and happiness and white-picket fences, but movies that grab you and pay off are never finally about characters fulfilled.
