The Spielberg Ending: Minority Report

The conclusion of Minority Report strikes me as a joke Spielberg played on his detractors — an act of perfectly measured deviltry.

The complaint about the ending is that it wraps itself up too tidily: John Anderton (Tom Cruise), a cop from a future where precognitive humans allow criminals to be arrested for their intent without the crime actually being committed, is caught by his own system and imprisoned — a life sentence to be spent in a coma, even though he knows it's a frame job orchestrated by his boss, Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow). However, Anderton's ex-wife Lara (Kathryn Morris) catches Burgess in a slip of the tongue that reveals his own crime, and so she springs Anderton from confinement so he can ensnare Burgess at an awards ceremony in his honor. Confronted with the truth and overcome with guilt, Burgess kills himself. This could certainly be considered at odds with the tone of the rest of the movie; it is the only scene of justice in a movie that chronicles injustice and corruption.

Would Spielberg turn those tonal tables to land an up ending? Sure. Minority Report is primarily a film noir, and such stories can end with the protagonist's victory, although Anderton's victory in this film is less compromised than most of its peers (provided you look past the physical torment he endured and the dismantling of the precog crime department for which he was a figurehead).

But let's look back at the movie to see when that shift in tone occurs, when things start looking up for our hero.

GIDEON

You're a part of my flock now, John. Welcome.

The camera pulls back to reveal Gideon (Tim Blake Nelson), who stands guard over the convicted criminals sentenced to "halo sleep" — the forced coma.

GIDEON

It's actually kind of a rush. They say that you have visions. That your life flashes before your eyes. That all your dreams come true.

Anderton, trussed up and with a fluorescent ring around his head, is being tilted up into a sci-fi sarcophagus. Utterly passive, he is fitted into the cylinder and it descends into the ground. We see his name and case number light up on a tombstone that marks his resting place. Then: utter blackness except for the glow of his infernal headband, which glows brighter and brighter, barely illuminating his sleeping eyes. Then, pow, cut to Burgess, duked out in finery in his burnished wood study, saying "This is all my fault" to Lara, moments before his inadvertent confession.

Those of you who were not going to the movies in 2002 might be saying to yourself, "They actually fell for that?" And I swear to you they did. Nobody but nobody said word one about this being the oldest trick in the book.

What's the dream of a betrayed lawman, if not that an unjust world would become just? What's the dream of a bereaved ex-husband, if not that his wife would always fight for him? There's no "concrete" evidence that the ending of the movie is Anderton's dream, which is exactly why it's so sly. Rather than end this Brazil-ian sci-fi dystopia with the equivalent of that film's shot of its lobotomized hero, which puts the lie to the immediately previous scene of his imagined liberation, Spielberg tries to pass off the exact same ending but without the rimshot, just to see if the audience is paying attention.

Or, to be more fair, he lets the audience pick its ending, but there's no way that the filmmakers were unaware of the implication. A screenwriter like Scott Frank doesn't write a scene like the one described above, and Steven Spielberg likewise does not film it, without being savvy to all its meanings. Given the uncreative response that greeted A.I., you wonder if Spielberg decided to create a trap for his detractors with Minority Report — he gave them the unhappy ending they were likely to desire, complete with all the cliché signifiers (cutting from a sleeping man's face to his dream), and the trick's on them if they can't realize it.

Introduction | Saving Private Ryan | A.I. | Catch Me If You Can | The Terminal

E-mail Sean Weitner at sean at flakmag dot com.