the ending....

Yes but it doesn't exactly mean he did give up! It's him saying i am going to try and you'd imagine that it wouldn't have been plain sailing and him never drinking again, but you could say that his book and actually properly deciding to do it would be the focus and reason to stay off.

Additionally although i've never been an alcoholic i have heard of people who overcame it, saying the simply woke up one day and said enough is enough, okay it's not like you click your fingers and that's that, but it's on the road to recovery...

I would Imagine after the first page he would have been back on the Booze.
However I would like think he kived happily ever after. Like most good films you can use your imagination and end the film there.
They don't make films like this anymore.........Fantastic.

If an alcoholic hates himself so much that he tried to kill himself, why cant he tried to do something useful, like writing something about himself. The movie actually reminds me "Prozac Nation", which should be a convincing example. The point here is not giving up alcohol, but starting to do something to change the situation.

The ending ruins it. This could be a 5 star movie but because of that fuc ked-up end it's just a 3 star movie. Not only is it plain stupid but it's absolutely unlogical if you think about the earlier events. It was all about how hopeless his situation is and suddenly it's not... yeah right.

I felt the ending weakenend the whole movie. They probably figured at the time after making an audience go through an hour and a half of depressing scenes they needed to give them some hope. Audiences at the time almost never saw movies like this, so it would have been even worse for them. The hopeful ending would have been a requirement.

I felt that the most fitting ending is exactly what the bartender predicted for the story - suicide.


"My name is Paikea Apirana, and I come from a long line of chiefs stretching all the way back to the Whale Rider."

[deleted]

I think we have to keep in mind the fact that he was planning to suicide. After the nightmarish weekend he had, he took a bath, shaved and got ready to kill himself. At that very moment, his mind was lucid, everything was clear in his heart. It's interesting that for the first time, he refuses to drink, he's lost the taste of life, and alcoholoc was the fuel he needed to live.

Then, when he finally gives up the idea of suicide, he still has pulled himself together and he's able to stay a few hours without alcohol since he set his mind and body up to that renouncement. All he has to do is start to write his novel and see where it's leading to. Just give it a chance, and he lived such a terrible experience he's got enough inspiration to write four of five chapters, even the whole book, all he has to do is think back to the beginning of that weekend, with the bottle hanging from the window.

It's a kind of transfer, the lack of alcoholoc and the subsequent feeling of emptyness will be exorcised by filling the black sheet, by talking about the demons that ravaged the soul for such a long time.

"Darth Vader is scary and I The Godfather"

I agree that the ending was ridiculously and abruptly upbeat. A drunk with the agonizing addiction that Ray Milland spent a whole movie portraying could not suddenly pirouette into sunny optimism and cold-turkey sobriety, as if the the movie's budget had suddenly been slashed, or as if the writer had suddenly run out of ideas. The ending made the movie fall flat.