I thoroughly enjoyed the movie “Secondhand Lions” the first time I saw it. I would love to do a big long essay some time comparing the movie with “Big Fish,” another movie released the same year which has an interestingly-similar premise but a quite different tone and resolution.

Anyway, I knew from reading IMDb that the ending I’d seen was not the original, and that the ending was re-shot and changed after preview screenings of the movie. I also knew that the DVD contained the original ending as a bonus “alternate scene.”

I will explain this without spoilers, although it will be difficult. On one hand, I tend to be skeptical of art-by-committee and I was afraid that perhaps the original ending reached a different conclusion about the characters and their motivations. From an artistic standpoint, I worried that the filmmakers had somehow made their ending happier or more sentimental purely for the sake of marketing.

Then again, I like the warm-hearted, feel-good ending which the film ended up with. The movie has a theme related to faith, and about what we choose to believe in. I was afraid that if the original ending was less sentimental, it might also have carried a different message about the importance and value of faith.

Well, I saw the movie in the bargain bin at Wal-Mart last week, and finally got around to seeing the alternate ending for myself.

I am happy to report that the filmmakers were on the side of the angels when they reshot the ending. The change was not made in order to over-sentimentalize the movie; if anything, the original ending was sappier than the final version. It was also slower and clumsier than the final version. The changes made by the filmmakers didn’t change the message of the movie at all; they simply punched up the ending, making it more entertaining by wrapping up the story in a different way. The basic conclusion, in terms of the moral of the story, is the same in both versions.

I do, actually, have a little tickle of reluctance about one aspect of the movie’s premise. The movie stresses the value of believing in something, but at one point one of the characters tells another that it doesn’t matter in what you believe as long as you believe in something. In its most literal sense, of course, I reject that statement. I am not a universalist. I think that it does matter in what you believe. But the movie can also be taken as a parable for the need to believe in something before you have evidence of it — to take a leap of faith.

Happily, that parable applies just as well to either of the movie’s endings.

[imdb]0327137[/imdb]