Great Endings: Play It, Sam

“Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

—Rick Blaine, Casablanca

Casablanca has long been my favorite film. It is perhaps the closest thing to what I would consider a perfect movie. Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, and Claude Rains lead a stellar cast. Arthur Edeson’s black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous, and Michael Curtiz’s direction somehow holds romance, suspense, humor, and wartime drama together without allowing any one of them to overwhelm the others.

If you have not seen it, stop reading and watch it.

This is a series about endings, so I am going to spoil it.

At the end of the film, all of our major players gather on a foggy night at the airport outside Casablanca. Rick Blaine, our cynical and wounded hero, appears to have arranged an escape for himself and Ilsa Lund, the woman he loved and believed he had lost after the Nazi occupation of Paris.

Ilsa’s husband, Victor Laszlo, is a celebrated leader in the resistance against fascism. The Germans are determined to capture him before he can escape Casablanca and continue his work. Rick possesses the letters of transit that can carry two people to safety, and for most of the final act, it seems that he intends to use them to begin a new life with Ilsa.

At the last moment, however, Rick reveals his true plan. He will remain behind while Ilsa leaves with Victor.

Rick understands that if Ilsa stays with him, she may someday regret abandoning Victor and the cause he represents. He also knows that Victor’s work is too important to be sacrificed for Rick’s personal happiness. So Rick puts Ilsa on the plane and watches the future he had imagined disappear into the fog.

The ending famously underwent several changes and was still being shaped as the film was being made. That uncertainty may be part of what gives the final scene its power. The characters themselves stand at a point where several endings seem possible, and Rick must decide what kind of story he is willing to enter.

His decision is an act of self-sacrifice.

Scripture repeatedly describes love as the willingness to place another person’s good alongside—or even ahead of—our own desires. Jesus tells his disciples, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Paul urges the church in Philippi to do nothing from selfish ambition, but to look not only to their own interests but also to the interests of others. In Galatians, he tells the church to bear one another’s burdens and, in doing so, fulfill the law of Christ.

These passages are not simply instructions to make ourselves miserable or to believe that our own needs never matter. Christian self-sacrifice is not the destruction of the self. It is the refusal to treat the self as the center of every story.

To love another person is to recognize that their life, their calling, their pain, and their flourishing matter beyond the ways they affect us. Sometimes love asks us to carry a burden. Sometimes it asks us to surrender our comfort or our need to be right. Sometimes it means letting go of an ending we deeply wanted because we have come to see that there is a greater good beyond it.

Great endings do not always give the hero everything they wanted. Sometimes they reveal what the hero has finally learned to value.

Rick begins the film believing that survival means caring for no one. He ends it by discovering that a meaningful life requires us to care, to risk, and occasionally to place something greater than our own happiness at the center of the story.

For us, these choices never have the same dramatic framing as a fog-covered runway in a black and white film. But we will all be asked, in smaller and less cinematic ways, whether we are willing to bear another person’s burden. We may be asked to surrender some comfort, release some control, forgive an old injury, or allow someone else’s needs to interrupt the story we had written for ourselves.

Self-sacrifice does not always look like losing one’s life. Sometimes it means choosing not to live only for oneself.

Sometimes the ending we surrender becomes the beginning of a more faithful story.

Rev. Ryan Young