By Kathleen Murphy
Special to MSN Movies

A couple days ago I urged a friend to catch "Away From Her," Sarah Polley's wise, beautiful movie about late-life love and Alzheimer's disease. Making the kind of face my cat puts on when she sniffs something bad, my friend wondered whether she should go: "It's really depressing, isn't it?"

Hhhmmm. How to answer that all-too-familiar question? I could tell exactly what she was thinking: Why should I buy a ticket to pain, to some unhappy vision of human experience? Isn't it enough that we have to live through harsh times? What's the point of suffering through a feel-bad movie?

My pal's got a point -- and she's not alone. Many moviegoers miss out on the best and richest film art in favor of Prozac cinema, Dream Factory stuff that never cuts deep enough to open them up to love and pain and the whole damn thing. Never mind that feel-good drivel asks nothing of viewers -- and, by the same token, offers little of lasting value.

Don't misunderstand -- I'm not saying every film you go to should be of the tragic variety, or that all films that deal with painful subjects are automatically good for you. I love a good popcorn movie as much as the next person. Still, a steady diet of such flicks will diminish you -- like soma, the feel-good drug doled out by the government in "Brave New World" to keep the masses zombified. Permanently cocooned in unchallenged complacency, you'll never feel the pain of growing up to/through tough love, heroic living, self-knowledge.

During the flailing controversy about Mel Gibson's ultrabloody depiction of "The Passion of the Christ" in 2004, one New Age-y minister complained that the film didn't sufficiently focus on Jesus' "Good News." No, my good man, this particular movie chose to chronicle a very specific aspect of godhood: the radical willingness to deliberately put on the body of man and suffer all the torture and mutilation human flesh is heir to -- even though god's son could have walked away from the pain at any point.

Seems if you're going to buy into a religion that has that brand of brutal sacrifice at its heart, there's something a little dishonest about not being willing or able to witness said sacrifice in all of its horrendous grandeur. But, no, it's Good News and instant gratification we want, not the awful labor that gets us to the promised land.

Waiting for Godot With Tony Soprano
Under the right circumstances, even slaughter looks like Good News.

Part low-rent Greek tragedy, part Mafia soap opera, "The Sopranos" never delivered what you'd call feel-good storytelling, what with nonstop whacking and all that familial Sturm und Drang. However, as the landmark show approached end times, viewers anticipated, indeed craved, the kind of climax that would put a melodramatic period -- or better yet, a bloody exclamation point -- to Tony Soprano's life of unquiet desperation. Closure is what we wanted, and even if our Tony was never a glamorous godfather or goodfella, we figured we could bank on the Big Guy going out with some kind of bang!

What we got was same-o, same-o: a family sit-down at a diner where possibly menacing folk mingle with ordinary Joes. Tony punches in Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" on the jukebox. Meadow arrives. Screen blacks out.

Why did these final moments of "The Sopranos" provoke such denial, wrath and disappointment? Why would we clearly prefer a bloodbath to the "horror" of flawed lives going on and on and on, just as they always have, never crowned with any overarching significance or closure? How radical can you get, David Chase, to deprive us of a conclusion that ties off all the loose ends and makes sense of all that came before? From cave paintings to "Lord of the Rings," human nature has been hooked on the emotional rush that comes from a knockout ending after a long, dangerous journey.

We needed Tony's life -- that eight-season string of murder, betrayal, despair -- to add up to something, preferably death. We want our screens to go black because, literally or figuratively, no one's left standing, nothing's left to say or do, not because someone chose -- randomly, casually -- to turn the camera off. What if God the Cosmic Director/Writer/Cinematographer pulled that?

Think of that black screen as an existential black hole, the Big Nothing, or nada, as Hemingway called it. All the stuff we shore up against the feel-bad possibility that there's no intrinsic meaning or direction or order in our lives gets sucked into that darkness. It's the black that swallows the screen after the snow globe drops from Citizen Kane's hand and the nurse covers the dead mogul's face. Shakespeare maps that darkness. So do films such as "Sunrise," "The Searchers," "Vertigo," "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia," "The Hours," "Brokeback Mountain," "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," "Million Dollar Baby" and "Pan's Labyrinth," just for starters.

Feel-Bad Foreign Flicks
It has to be said that American movie houses are especially inhospitable to smart feel-bad flicks that touch us to the quick. (Keep in mind, I'm talking about really good movies about ordinary/extraordinary human experience, grown-up stuff that's painfully enlightening and ennobling.) It's no credit to our box-office tastes that a good many films of this finer stripe come from overseas, from countries where there is still a tradition of serious filmmaking. Isn't it odd that in a nation where life is mostly a breeze, movie art should be largely devoted to froth and fun, while more beleaguered locales produce stories with spine?

Check out the cream of international filmmaking, showcased every year at Cannes and other discriminating film fests: movies that matter, movies that rock us out of rote responses, movies that reach out and grab audiences with something more than comic-book special effect. MSN Movies editor Dave McCoy, writing from Cannes on this year's Palme d'Or winner, was sadly accurate: "The finest of the five films I've seen so far is Cristian Mungiu's '4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days' [about a teen's horrific quest for an illegal abortion in Communist Romania]. It's the type of rough ride ... that will make most of you feel very uncomfortable and say to yourself, 'Uh yeah ... won't be seeing that.' And that'd be a shame."

And even if you wanted to see Mungiu's much-honored film, you live in a country that has pretty much stopped giving screen space to movies from other shores ... just another way to stay insulated from unfamiliar, possibly disquieting realities.

Even certain kinds of horror movies have to be dressed up -- with Good News -- for American audiences. Last year's "The Descent," a British import, turned out to be a terrifically scary, affecting variation on "Deliverance," featuring a bunch of longtime female friends spelunking their way into a subterranean hell. Like the best kind of horror movie, "The Descent" used terror as a scalpel to strip away civilization's necessary lies and pretense, exposing psychic bare bone. The film climaxed on an iconic image of maternal yearning in the very heart of darkness -- and as soon as you saw this heartbreaking shot, you recognized it as the film's only true narrative destination. Trouble is, if you watched the film in an American multiplex, you would have been spared that figurative blow to the solar plexus, in favor of a tacked-on, "happy" escape from feel-bad territory.

Given the availability of cinematic torture porn in American movie houses, why did we need to be protected from the no-exit finish of "The Descent"? Because that shattering conclusion was rooted in flesh-and-blood reality, in the kind of pain and loss we all suffer at some time in our lives, the death we must face in the end. "Snuff" movies are just machines to mindlessly mutilate flesh into meat. After awhile, unless you are a very sick puppy, meat-grinding can be as boring and meaningless as watching paint dry.

Next: More Feel-Bad Flicks