Maybe it really is a wonderful life: Growing happier with happy film endings

Jimmy Stewart in the 1946 film “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Am I’m getting too old for unhappy endings?

That’s a dangerous, maybe even treasonous thing, for any self-respecting film critic to suggest. After all, we’re supposed to be a bleak, bitter group. Want to know how much we admire a film? Read a review and count up the times we use words like “gritty” or “uncompromising.”

Yet sometimes, I’ve realized, I need a film that goes a little easier.

A few nights ago, for example, I came across “Heat” on cable. This epic 1995 thriller from Michael Mann — with Robert De Niro as an icy professional criminal and Al Pacino as the fiery detective on his trail — is one of a handful of movies that, if I tune in at almost any point, I know I’ll watch until the end.

This time, though, I turned it off with maybe 10 minutes still to go.

Robert De Niro in “Heat.”

Not because I loved it any less than I always have. But it had reached the moment where, having finally tied up one last loose end, De Niro’s oddly honorable crook walks away — from his chance at happiness with a woman who loves him, but also from the cop on his trail, and maybe from crime itself. He fades into the crowd.

And I thought, “Yeah, I’m good.”

I don’t need to keep watching to see De Niro get his just deserts. I can skip the death and defeat. Let’s just leave it here, with a little bit of ambiguity. A little bit of hope.

Which is funny, because when I was a teenager back in the ’70s, I loved tragic endings, the more hopeless the better. Why shouldn’t Tyrone Power end “Nightmare Alley” as a damned-to-hell geek? Why shouldn’t Gary Cooper kill himself at the end of “Meet John Doe”?

And, seriously, wouldn’t “Jaws” be even better if Richard Dreyfuss didn’t survive? And if the last shot was of Roy Scheider alone, clinging to the mast of a slowly sinking boat?

Dark was smart, I believed. Dark was sophisticated. Like Margo Channing in “All About Eve” — a movie that, not coincidentally, avoided its own pat, stand-up-and-cheer finale — I detested “cheap sentiment.”

Luckily for me, though, just as I was getting seriously interested in cinema, cinema was getting seriously glum. Outside of the occasional Steven Spielberg film, even big studio releases reveled in defeat and despair.

Jack Nicholson in “Chinatown.”

Conspiracy thrillers like “The Parallax View” and “The Conversation” fed our era’s paranoia, horror shows from “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” to “The Omen” told us the mad and the monstrous were unstoppable. “The Godfather” ended with the murderous Michael comfortably in charge; “Taxi Driver” put Travis calmly back behind the wheel. “Chinatown” finished with its hero broken, its heroine dead, and its incestuous villain poised to abuse yet another generation.

The ’70s weren’t just a golden age of cinema. They were a golden age of cynicism. And back then — when I was a wannabe film-school student, already looking over college catalogs — that seemed perfectly right and reasonable. Movies and melancholy just seemed to go together.

So why do I yearn for happy endings now?

Because the older I get, the more I need them.

I could handle unhappy endings back then — even welcome them — maybe because, ironically, I myself was still pretty optimistic. Even as a teenager, I knew the country wasn’t perfect. But I also thought it could be perfected. I was convinced that people of different opinions could still engage in reasonable and rational discussion, that even white-hot outrage could be transformed into constructive change.

Now, I’m not so sure.

And I think that over, the years, as I grew more realistic — OK, more pessimistic — I became less enthusiastic about movies that encouraged cynicism. I had enough of those dark thoughts on my own, just reading the news. So it became helpful — even healthy — to see movies that challenged that bleakness, that offered a little respite. That envisioned a world where, even if the good guys didn’t win, exactly, they lived to fight another day.

So yes, just as in my idealistic youth I appreciated the bracing contrast of dark movies, as a more pessimistic senior I welcome the occasional hopefulness of an upbeat film.

I’m not arguing that a cheerful finale makes every picture better. Unless the last act is truly organic, motivated by the characters and the story, it becomes that dreaded “Hollywood ending” — the sort of tacked-on anticlimax that flies in the face of all that has gone before.

But these days I’ve come to appreciate leaving a movie theater feeling a little happier than when I entered.

Leonardo DiCaprio in “The Departed.”

There are exceptions, of course. I still prefer horror movies that end with a frisson of fear, and tragic romances that dissolve in tears. And I haven’t lost my taste for the work of some of cinemas’ greatest pessimists — Kubrick, Polanski, the Coens (although I think the Coens are proof of the adage: scratch a cynic and you’ll find a disappointed idealist). My favorite living filmmaker remains Martin Scorsese, and apart from “The Departed” — not coincidentally, the one film he finally won an Oscar for — most of his movies end with heroes defeated and villains unpunished.

But more and more, I find, I appreciate movies where good deeds do go unpunished. Where given the choice between doing something easy and sleazy, or hard but honorable, characters choose the difficult option. Movies that suggest there may be a shape and a purpose to life, and a possibility that, no matter how different we are, we might still, eventually, learn to live together.

Sure, these days, I may still wince a bit at “Meet John Doe.” But you know what? I love “It’s a Wonderful Life” more than ever.