I thought Payne trying to commit suicide at the end was a bit much. I think a man attempting to shoot himself and possibly others by accident would easily overshadow whatever the Senate had been discussing. It just made shifting back toward a happy ending with Jeff a bit abrupt. Loved the film, I guess I'm just nitpicking a bit.
See you in hell, candy boys!share
Personally I think an attempted suicide is more realistic than Paine going out there (right as he was winning, no less) and coming clean about everything in front of the whole Senate and demanding his own expulsion. If the film were going for full realism though, there wouldn't have been any happy ending at all. Smith would have lost if Paine hadn't lost his nerve at the very end.
I like the movie and all but I think the ending was too naive and idealistic. It would have been a better movie if Smith had indeed lost. Not because we want Smith to lose but because that's how it would have happened and it would have been a realistic portrayal of how Washington works. One "good guy" can't beat an entire, deeply entrenched, political machine. Not with proclamations of abstract ideals and morals and "the way things should be", anyway, but only with actual evidence of a crime, which Smith didn't present. And yes, occasionally corruption is exposed and people are expelled from the government for it, sometimes even imprisoned for it, but they never declare their own guilt in such a dramatic fashion as Paine did. The kind of thing that Smith was fighting against was the norm, the way Washington normally functions, not some isolated incident involving a couple of "bad apples" in a fundamentally good and clean government.
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