Friday Night at the Movies: What a Twist!

M. Night Shyamalan has gone from the Golden Boy of Hollywood to the butt of its jokes, all because he made a habit of finishing his films with twist endings.  Instead of being surprising, like a good twist should be, the endings of his later films were gimmicky.  Everybody knew a twist was coming, whether they knew what the twist was or not, and so they lost most, if not all, of their power.

However, there was nothing gimmicky about the ending of Shyamalan's first film, The Sixth Sense.  Today the film suffers from being a cultural touchstone, so most know the ending in advance, but those of us who had the pleasure of seeing it in the theater remember what a shock the ending was.  It was everything a good twist should be; it was impossible to figure out before it arrived, and it changed the entire movie, making you want to see it again immediately.

Tonight's FNatM focuses on flicks with great twist endings, but I have one ground rule before we begin.  Please, avoid all spoilers in the comments if possible.

Chinatown is perhaps one of the last great film noirs.  This unrelentingly bleak film stars Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes, Private Eye.  Hired to investigate a simple infidelity case, he soon gets roped into a web of conspiracy surrounding L.A.'s water supply in the 1930's.  Our femme fatale is Faye Dunaway, brilliant as ever, and it the revelation surrounding her character that is so unexpected, and so tragic.  Chinatown reminds us that men sometimes commit evil deeds for the most mundane reasons, namely, because they can get away with it.

I love Robert Altman flicks.  To me, Altman makes movies that are the closest thing to real life and still manage to keep me interested.  Gosford Park is one of his finest works.  Set during a shooting weekend in a British country house between the Great Wars, the film centers around the murder of the head of the house, the odious William McCordle.  The place is teeming with people.  McCordle invited nearly twenty guests, all with their servants in tow, and everybody has a reason to kill the bastard.  In fact, he gets poisoned by one person, and then stabbed by another.  Like all Altman films, the cast is enormous, but what a cast it is.  Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, Michael Gambon, Kristen Stewart, Clive Owen, Emma Watson, and on and on and on.  The ending obviously reveals the identity of the murderer, or rather murderers.  Yet, it is not who committed the crime that makes the end of Gosford Park so devastating, but rather the why.  It's an entirely different movie the second time around, and a better one at that.

I'd like to talk about the twist in Fight Club, but I don't want to break the first two rules.

Christopher Nolan is one of the most talented directors making movies today, and he burst onto the scene with his brilliant debut, Memento.  Guy Pearce stars as Leonard Shelby, a man in search of his wife’s murderer, but there is a hitch.  Shelby took a knock on the head when his wife was attacked, and it left him unable to make new memories.  He can remember everything before the accident, but nothing after, and nothing beyond five minutes into the past.  Nolan puts us in Shelby’s shoes by telling the story backward.  We start with Shelby finding his wife’s killer and, segment-by-segment, go back until we find out what put him on the trail.  To be entirely accurate, this film really has a twist beginning.

Eastern Promises, released this year, does not have a twist as profound or breathtaking as the others I’ve mentioned, but I would be remiss if I didn’t take an opportunity to mention a David Cronenberg film.  The Canadian Cronenberg is my favorite director by far, because he makes uncompromising, interesting films.  His latest features Naomi Watts as a midwife who becomes ensnared in the London chapter of the Russian mob after a fourteen-year-old girl dies in her hospital leaving nothing but a nameless child and a diary in Russian.  Viggo Mortensen is a low-level mob enforcer, the driver and errand man for Armin Mueller-Stahl’s mob boss.  For the ladies (and some men), the film does feature Mortensen in full frontal nudity, although it is in service of one of the most brutal and intense fight scenes ever committed to celluloid.  Like all of Cronenberg’s work, Eastern Promises is graphically violent, but that’s part of why I love this director's films.  He never fetishizes his violence, but makes it completely unappetizing, which makes it closer to real gore than most Hollywood fare.  If you can stomach blood, I highly recommend this flick.

I’m leaving out some of the greatest films in this admittedly limited genre, mostly because I haven’t seen them yet.  I’m sure you commenters will fill in the gaps, and chastise me for having not seen what should be mandatory viewing.

I’d also like to thank occam’s hatchet for letting me drive his bus tonight.  I’m truly honored to be the boot member of the FNatM team.

So, what are your favorite twists?