besides the other major flaws going on with this film, the biggest is giving a happy ending to a story of a sane person falling in love with someone with schizophrenia. obviously the director or writer knows nothing about schizophrenia except what is written in books, because it is horribly portrayed. a great idea for a film.. but the execution is horrible. what do the rest of you think?
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Sorry Steve, but schizophrenia is degenerative. I work in the mental health field and trust me, there is usually no happy ending. The days of a schizophrenic being locked up for life babbling to himself are long gone. There is more emphasis these days on shorter hospitalizations and trying to integrate them into the community but most never get to lead independent lives. Most end up on disability or they work at sheltered or menial jobs. It doesn't matter if they were PhD students or high school dropouts before they got ill, it's a very debilitating illness most of them do not have happy endings.
The best case scenario is usually a semi-independent life. I don't know any schizophrenic who is completely independent.
There are some people who have had successful careers despite having schizophrenia. One person is Prof. Elyn Saks who graduated with honors from Yale Law School and is now a professor at USC.
http://www.schizophrenia.com/sznews/archives/005418.html
In real life there is no such things as happy endings for anyone. Life just goes on and we live it the best we can, whatever our situation is.
The ending of the movie is what seemed unrealistic because of how truncated it is. It says Two Years Later, then they reunite and then meet her roommate and his sister who are bouncing with unsurpassed joy and glee indicating just how swell everything has turned out. It seems tacked on and unrelated to the tone of the rest of the movie.
But hey, everything is cool cause he lost an eye, she's a schizophrenic, his sister has grown up without a mother and her father is incapable of affection or love but everything turns out great because its two years later and no one has aged and they were somehow transported to a new place where problems dont exist and are greeted by Mr. Roarke and a Dwarf named Tattoo who welcome them all to Fantasy Island.