Happy Endings, The Player, and Endings Too Happy for Words

The Player is one of my favorite movies with a happy ending.

There are plenty of great movies with happy endings.

I’m not one of those filmgoers who feels like he’s being pandered to or toyed with emotionally when he’s given a “Hollywood ending.”

I’m probably more likely to roll my eyes at a depressing ending that wasn’t earned, more than I am a happy one that was. Both are contrivances.

I am aware, however, that the happy ending is a trope and cliche.

Anyway, The Player is so “meta” about its happy ending, that it strikes me as unique.

The entire film is a satire of Hollywood.

Tim Robbins plays Griffin Mill, a studio executive responsible for green-lighting “12 of the 50,000 submissions” his studio receives each year.

When Mill starts receiving death threats, he thinks they’re from a screenwriter whose script he rejected. When he confronts the screenwriter, they get in a brawl, and Mill drowns him in a puddle.

Meanwhile, Mill is in a work rivalry with a man he believes is trying to replace him at the studio. So when Habeas Corpus becomes the hot new script, Mill lets his rival push it through to production.

It doesn’t have any movie stars, and it has a depressing ending. Mill thinks he will jump in at the last minute and save the day by tacking a happy ending onto the script.

And this is just what he does.

At the end, Mill has a beautiful, happy family. He lives in a Hollywood mansion, and he drives a baller-ass convertible.

As he’s driving home one day, he gets a call from the man who’d been sending him death threats. The man pitches an idea for a film, about a studio executive who kills a writer and gets away with murder.

Mill says he’ll green-light the film, but only if he can guarantee there’ll be a happy ending.

The writer says he can, and the title of the script is The Player.

When Mill pulls up to his mansion, everything is in the hazy soft focus of a dream.

Brilliant!