Quote:
Originally Posted by Spiwak
For the triangle, I too thought it tested the boundaries of reality a little bit, but in the context of this story I thought it made perfect sense. The two men could just have easily become the same person if their childhoods had played out differently--the are essentially mirror images of each other, with Farmiga split down the middle by said mirror (if that makes any sense).
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Makes perfect sense and a nice little fairy tale, but it's still not very believable that the same woman falls for both men, who just happen to be moles (one for the cops, one for the criminals) hunting for each other, in a city with as many men as Boston to choose from.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Spiwak
I think it would have been cheap if Damon had simply "gotten away" with it, because then that would make him a perfect example of the Socratetian perfectly unjust man feeding his beast and lion and enfeebling his man with no consequence to offset it; it's an incomplete character (and one that doesn't exist), which might work in children's movies and action movies but I would have been pissed if Damon didn't learn his lesson.
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Sorry... For me it's
precisely the children's movies and action movies where the bad guys are required to "learn their lesson". In movies about real life, bad men don't always see the error of their ways or get punished for it. Nor do they always go on leading a "hollow life" if those other things don't happen. Now, that worked
brilliantly in The Godfather Part II where it ended on Michael sitting on the bench, an empty shell of a man who had just ordered the death of his own brother. But while it works in that story, it doesn't work in every story. It doesn't make a villain an incomplete character simply because he outwits everyone else, gets away with it, and possibly doesn't even feel any regret.
