Movie article

Stories can start negatively, but here are some decent examples of turning story negatives to positives, because of character. That follows.

Screenwriters always ask: how should a story end?

To find their ending, they ask: from the choices the main character could possibly make, how would the story end?

Or, how would a secondary character be a decisive figure in the story’s outcome?

The writer has to factor in up-endings with many of the stories he writes because people want up-endings so the writer creates suitable characters.

Stories can start negatively, but here are some decent examples of turning story negatives to positives, because of character:

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967)

Racism is an issue that never goes away and in 1967 this film was considered ‘edgy’ though now it is quite tame if not edgy at all.

The male patriarch, of a white middle class couple, played by Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, is challenged by his daughter’s choice of partner, a black man (played by Sydney Poitier).

The issue is still confronting of human nature: are people comfortable to accept people who are ‘different’?

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is part comedy, but also a drama. As the white male patriarch, Tracy’s character’s speech at the end says this guy really isn’t a racist.

There was something in him that was able to rationalize and articulate a fair point of view, which affirms the positive in a challenging situation.

Cocoon (1985)

The elderly are rarely given a film to themselves and there are more elderly in Cocoon than younger folk.

As if being elderly is all about being redundant and past their expiry date. Cocoon injects life into the subject by making their elderly characters real and endearing.

However, there is no doubt that the premise is a fantasy—they stumble upon alien cocoons in their swimming pool which gives them energy for living life to the full—but hope in life is infectious, and this comedy-fantasy has some great moments.

If we talk to an elderly person, we may find they are confronted by a serious choice, to live or not to live. But they would really like to live their lives to the full. Cocoon sees what the elderly see, developing that in an affirming way, which results in a hopeful climatic scene.

12 Years a Slave (2013)

Perhaps the best film made of the decade so far, because it deals uncompromisingly with the issue of racism and slavery as a well-off black man is sold into slavery in America in the 1800s.

There is an uncanny touch of divine intervention and redemption, which says, life does not have to end on the negative, even in situations as bad as this. We feel the powerlessness of the central character, but a secondary character, an anti-slavery advocate (played by Brad Pitt), is there for a very life affirming reason.

12 Years a Slave is also a picture of what one does through life-draining circumstances, as the salves support each other and find other ways to survive during their ordeal, as they still have the will to live.