The fuss about spoilers before the launch of Star Wars: The Last Jedi was further proof of how hot under the collar filmgoers can get about anyone giving away plot details. Some people got death threats for disclosing Jedi secrets on Facebook.
Film critics are generally barred by their editors from revealing plot twists from the second half of a film. No matter how relevant the storyline, or how difficult it is to convey the film without reference to it, we must keep schtum.
A Date for Mad Mary, Darren Thornton’s Drogheda-set film from 2016, was particularly tricky. Mary (Seána Kerslake) is on the hunt for a date to bring to her best friend’s wedding. The quest ends — and here comes the first of several enormous spoilers in this piece — with her falling for a woman. The story tension relies on the viewer not suspecting this might happen, so I didn’t mention it in my review.
One of the interesting aspects of the film is that it subverts the audience’s heterosexual presumptions. But I was conflicted; it is difficult to properly describe this film without mentioning it has a lesbian theme. And it had been shown at the Gaze International LGBT Film Festival in Dublin a month before its Irish release, so the lesbian theme was hardly a secret. The function of a critic is first to make a judgment about a film’s worth, but also to give readers a sense of its nature.
Song of Granite, a recent black-and-white biopic of sean nós singer Joe Heaney, directed by Pat Collins, has a moment of sheer sublimity five minutes before the end. It isn’t a plot point as such, more a stylistic device that is incredibly satisfying. The older man playing Joe (Macdara Ó Fátharta) meets his younger self (Colm Seoighe) by a river. It provides a psychological framework for what has gone before. I wanted to mention it in my review because it was such an enjoyable and clever feature of the film-maker’s vision, but feared death threats from militant Joe Heaney fans. Well, what I really feared were my editor’s threats, which are more easily executed.
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Audiences for most other art forms are comfortable with familiarity. Stand-up comics get complaints from the audience if they don’t repeat favourite gags in their sets. Fans of stand-up will entertain new material, but they also want to laugh at the familiar. A top musician who does too much “new stuff” in concert at the expense of old favourites will get booed off the stage.
It doesn’t bother theatregoers to know in advance there is a big body count at the end of Hamlet. Even the first audience for Shakespeare’s play knew this, because the Bard followed a version known as the Ur-Hamlet that had been performed 10 years earlier. Oedipus sleeps with his mother, kills his father, then gouges out his eyes; he has been doing this for 2,500 years, and still we watch. It is well known that Hedda Gabler commits suicide, and that Godot never comes. In musical theatre it can be difficult to sell a new and unfamiliar book or music. The audience for West Side Story will consist of multiple repeat attenders, who know every detail.
That said, there may be the beginnings of a culture change on spoilers in the theatre profession. During the Dublin Theatre Festival last year, the PR people sent out a request for critics not to give away the ending of On Blueberry Hill, by Sebastian Barry.
Sometimes film-makers make a conscious decision to give an audience foreknowledge of the plot. With Lenny Abrahamson’s film Room, anyone who had read Emma Donoghue’s novel would already know that Ma and Jack escape from captivity halfway through. Also, there had been much news coverage about the Elisabeth Fritzl case, widely seen as an inspiration for the novel. The Austrian woman had been held captive in a basement cell by her father, by whom she had several children, and finally escaped after convincing him to bring one of the children to hospital. The trailer for Room depicts the moment when five-year-old Jack (Jacob Tremblay) jumps from a truck to freedom, followed by his Ma (Brie Larson) emerging from the shed. The producers made a conscious decision to put this information out, and not to market the film as a thriller. Despite this, many reviewers studiously avoided revealing what had been made abundantly clear by the film-makers themselves.
Sometimes endings contain a significant shift in tone, and it can be difficult to describe the film without reference to it. With John Carney’s Sing Street, the ending is a lurch towards the surreal, where the teenage lovebirds Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) and Raphina (Lucy Boynton) set off in an implausible little boat across the Irish Sea en route to London, accompanied by Go Now, a sweet Adam Levine ballad. It is a dive for the sublime, pushing the film in a more experimental direction.
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Sometimes, the final section of an otherwise fine film takes a nosedive. Jim Sheridan’s The Field, which romps stylishly through the land-lust drama of the John B Keane source play, goes a bit crazy at the end. The movie falls off a cliff, with Richard Harris as Bull McCabe driving his herd of cattle over a precipice into the sea, and in the process implausibly killing his son Tadhg (Sean Bean). Son and cows fly slo-mo through the air. In a film that struck a lot of high, operatic notes, this moment is off the scale. The stage play ends quietly, with the Bull spitting defiance at the police and priest in Flanagan’s pub, but clearly struggling with his conscience.
Neil Jordan’s movie Michael Collins could end only one way — there’s no point in pretending we never heard of Béal na mBláth. Does it diminish the enjoyment of the film, knowing the Big Fella dies? In fact, it adds poignancy to everything that goes before, in particular the romance strand with Kitty Kiernan (Julia Roberts). Irish people would watch Collins scooting around on his bicycle, charming everyone and outmanoeuvring Dev (Alan Rickman), knowing there’s a bullet with his name on it. An American audience less familiar with Irish history might not be aware Collins gets shot. They are, therefore, having a spoiler-free experience. Is it a better film for them?
The film industry’s sensitivity to spoilers is caused by two factors.
First, film is dominated by new work; alone of the performance arts, it consistently reinvents itself. There are occasional remakes and adaptations, of course, but most films we review are new. Second, film has groomed and elevated the idea of suspense as a storytelling device.
I am not arguing for critics to be able to give away crucial plot devices — that would be silly. Yet, without giving a sense of the ending, critics are sometimes frustratingly aware they haven’t described the full picture.