I don't think they agreed to remain exclusive. If you remember, when they were spooning in the beginning, he was saying that she might be successful at school, and come home to find him already married. That was when she said that she was scared. I think they probably accepted that Holly was diverging from the path they'd both expected her to take, and that he wasn't, so they were fully accepting the possibility that they weren't going to stay together.
I also think we probably lost a crucial scene. When she calls him crying because things were going so poorly, he hangs up on her after she tells a man knocking on the phone booth to shut up and leave her alone (obviously, her bf thought he was talking to him). I think as an audience, we were supposed to assume that that was the official break-up scene, but we weren't given any true closure on the issue. I'm thinking that something ended up on the editing room floor that probably shouldn't have, on the hope that the audience would just assume they broke-up after the phone convo.
I think the film itself has an issue with closure. The end, as you pointed out, could have been expanded on. Sure, it ended on a high note, but we don't find out if Holly kept her scholarship (we're just supposed to assume that a classical school which doesn't condone breaking rules or teach for pop purposes was okay with her shoving it back into its face). After making such a big deal about the scholarship, it would make sense to have them tell us if she kept it.
As for whether Angela is really nice...meh, it's very cliche. This movie is very much a walking cliche, I think they balanced nicely so that it wasn't too much, but I think Angela turning out to be nice, like almost every other one of these films, would have tipped it over the fine edge on which it was walking.
reply
share