I know I know, there has been many discussions on this before, but WHY DID HE LOOSE IT???? He was finally getting it together!!!
sharei think seeing his wife with peter weller and the kids together was too much for him to take..
Standing for Freedom of Speechment
I dont think anyone was getting it together toward the end. I think they were trying to act how they thought they SHOULD and to make the best out of the situation as it was. This movie shows the overwhelming power and allure of the intact family...mother, father and children. Everyone learns that NOTHING can take the place of family...and that the hodgepodge they were creating was a poor (albeit temporarily novel and exciting) substitute for the real thing.
shareWell said joe-1000!!! This movie is great, and underrated!! I have seen some disturbing movies, but that tennis court scene, really gets to me!! When he starts driving that car, demolishing the tennis court, and gets that beat down!!So many emotions of my goodness!!!
shareHe'd proven throughout the movie that he had anger management issues. I think seeing his wife enjoying an improvement of "his" property with a new man and his kids at a party to which he wasn't invited was the final straw. SPOILERS FOLLOW: I think this movie should be shown to women going through divorces to show them the high cost of ignoring warning signs. This joker should have had a restraining order slapped on him after he broke into the house and assaulted his wife and kids. Call the police and make a report. Don't wait to see if it was a one-time thing, because anything that happens once can happen again.
shareI totally agree. After the time he went bananas and stormed the house, hitting his child, no one should be shocked by his lunacy regarding the tennis court. He also is a total hypocrit...all the "my house" nonsense and his jealousy about his wife dating someone new, when he was the one who cheated and poisoned his marriage. I was shocked that Diane Keaton's character would allow him near his kids again...especially when he sat there in court and let his lawyer deny that anything happened. The man was not just a father mourning the break-up of his family and the estrangement of his child, he was a nut-case...not the clinical term, of course.
shareall the "my house" nonsense
The whole film is an allegory of the card game Hearts. In Hearts, if you get stuck with a heart, it counts as a single point against you. The Queen of Spades counts as 13 points against you. HOWEVER, if you take ALL of the hearts and the Queen of Spades you gain 26 points IN YOUR FAVOR. This is called shooting the moon, is difficult to do, and takes a certain amount of boldness and craftiness.
The final scene is the card game, and the three daughters are hearts. At the end, he has the daughters in his arms and extends his hand out to his wife, the movie ends on that freeze frame. Faith is the Queen of Spades, he is done playing it safe, wants his family back, and shoots the moon.
There's another angle to the tennis court scene that hasn't been brought up. George was a writer, a highly accomplished man of literature. Frank was a blue collar stud who knew how to build things, much unlike George who probably spent most of his time typing away in his office. To Faith, George at one point even made fun of Frank for his handyman beer swiggin' vibe. Since he and Frank were such polar opposites, I think George was a bit jealous of him, and not just because he was banging his wife and positioning himself as a stepfather. Faith's move toward intimacy with a non-intellectual, but eminently capable and intelligent, blue collar construction guy suggests that she was sick of the relationship complexities swirling around witty intellectuals like George. I think a bit of competitive jealousy and some self doubt about what makes a man a "man" helped fuel George's maniacal rage.
shareWhen George and Faith start arguing in the restaurant and a nearby diner gets annoyed, Faith argues just as loudly as George. She doesn't become embarrassed and try to diffuse the situation. By the time that George and the other diner are pushing each other and threatening to come to blows, I was surprised to see her starting to smile because - she was enjoying it.
This, and not calling the police and getting a restraining order after George locked her out of the house and beat his daughter (a spanking amounts to a beating in this case, I think) makes me think that George was not alone in his 'anger management' issues; he had help with someone else throwing fuel on the fire.
I thought he truly deserved having Frank beat the crap out of him. He could have killed someone when he drove directly into the crowded tennis court. He acted like a bully, in the sense that he probably thought no one WOULD touch him after his fit of rage. There's not going to be any progress, emotionally, for this guy - if Faith lets this kind of thing happen and mulls it over in her mind for its significance. The only significance it has is: people go to jail for that kind of thing.