The “evil triumphant” ending, of course, is what tends to stick in my craw. Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne were said to have quarreled over its nature, with Towne eventually admitting that Polanski was right to insist on a tragic outcome. However, the ending as filmed suggests Towne recanted too easily. Stretching credibility, Chinatown goes over the top in a chaotic mess that sees everything from characters (i.e. Escobar and Gittes) not listening to each other despite the high stakes, to an old man getting shot and still managing to keep up with the young men to reach the car in which Faye Dunaway’s character, Evelyn, was shot dead.

It’s arbitrariness, though, that really undermines the possibility of dramatic truth in the tragedy. The bullet that kills Evelyn could just as easily have killed her sister/daughter or missed entirely. A concluding scenario, avoiding both the pointlessly bleak and the artificially happy, could have simultaneously left not only Gittes, but also underdeveloped characters like Noah Cross, changed men. As it stands, the impression is more that Polanski exercised his directorial authority to inject his own personal demons into someone else‚s script than tried to tell a story in which effect follows sensibly from cause.

You Call This A MacGuffin?

What unravels Chinatown isn’t the ending so much as its overall structure. It’s fashionable to treat its mystery, which involves a murder caught up in the corruption and business of California‚s water wars, as a MacGuffin — an object that is insignificant in itself, but important in how it causes characters to think and act. But considering that the film’s first two-thirds consist of nothing but trying to a) define the mystery and b) solve it, it is hard to see it as anything other than a vital — and frankly, quite interesting in itself — part of the film that goes beyond the mere MacGuffin. So when Chinatown switches gears in its last act, abandoning the mystery in favor of the “psychological drama” of Gittes’ past intersecting with that of femme-fatale-revealed-to-be-a-good-girl Evelyn’s, it feels as if we’ve stumbled into a different movie.

The change in tone, fresh with a lurid twist more appropriate to stories designed for them — such as in CSI or Law & Order: Special Victims Unit — also marks the change in structure. What begins as a narrative in which the characters themselves are less important than the plot suddenly changes into a narrative in which the reverse is true. The result is that Chinatown neither works as a mystery nor a psychological drama: the mystery undermines the depth the characters need for the psychological drama, and the drama deprives the mystery of its crowning moment.