Sadly, Fugitive Pieces has a happy ending.

Director Jeremy Podeswa has recut his Holocaust-themed drama set for a May 2 commercial release to save main character Jakob Beer from a bleak death in an Athens car accident before the credits roll.

This will allow filmgoers to dab their eyes and feel spiritually lifted as they rise from their seats, because Jakob, a man ever haunted by wartime memories, can now conclude his days in quiet happiness.

Of course, the difficulty is that Anne Michaels’ lyrical novel of the same name, on which the film is based, declared Jakob’s death in its prologue, before launching into a series of flashbacks and flash-forwards to tell his story.

And the original cut of the film that opened TIFF last September similarly foreshadowed Jakob’s tragic fate.

The decision to sugarcoat Fugitive Pieces came about because, as Podeswa recently told Playback, the film did not so much trigger tears during test screenings as leave faces crumpled for its gloom.

‘Clearly that was never our intention…we always believed that the film should be inspirational and hopeful, even as it deals with very difficult and complex subject matter,’ he explained.

The new ending to Fugitive Pieces should also brighten prospects at the box office and possibly replenish performance-based envelopes at Telefilm Canada for producer Robert Lantos, who is also releasing through his Maximum Films.

But this accounting for popular taste has more significant creative implications, coming as it does just weeks after Sarah Polley told a Senate committee hearing into the controversial Bill C-10 legislation that Canadian artists should have the luxury of public dollars to ‘push the envelope and make people uncomfortable.’

Rewiring Fugitive Pieces represents a marked departure from the bleak, difficult-to-watch art-house cinema on which Canadian film has built its reputation among international critics and festivals.

Who hasn’t watched a demanding Atom Egoyan or David Cronenberg film and hoped and prayed that the dark subject matter onscreen might take a turn for the better? It’s human to want to avoid and abhor morbid speculation and fear.

But it’s also a brave artist who resists the temptation to replace a tragic climax with a happy ending, especially when adapting literary works.

That bloody mess that was Mel Gibson’s snuff film The Passion of the Christ would most certainly have been quite a different movie if the Romans, believing Christ had endured enough lashing and slashing on the wooden cross, ordered him down before he might die to live happily ever after with Mary Magdalene.

And not all movies need a happy ending to drive home a message. Richie Mehta’s debut feature Amal, coming out this year, portrays a dying billionaire in India attempting to bestow newfound fortune on an honorable auto-rickshaw driver. The movie’s unexpected climax – and I won’t spoil it here – at first disappointed me, but on second thought satisfied because it stayed true to the naturalism and authenticity that the Canadian director intended.

Denying the tragic death of a film’s main character even has its uses beyond bolstering the odds for box-office glory.

Koji Masutani’s Virtual JFK, a documentary that had its world premiere at Hot Docs, employs a ‘what if’ scenario to judge how U.S. president John F. Kennedy would have dealt with Vietnam had he avoided assassination in 1963 and gone on to a second administration.

In considering how Kennedy might have led the U.S. involvement in Vietnam had he been re-elected in 1964, Masutani’s film employs extensive footage of Kennedy press conferences and speeches before his death to illustrate how he made presidential decisions during key Cold War events – the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, possible intervention in Laos, the Berlin Wall going up, the Cuban Missile Crisis and a decision on whether to pull U.S. troops from Vietnam or commit more to the South East Asian conflict.

‘There’s no filter. We wanted Kennedy to speak for himself,’ Masutani explains.

Time and again, Virtual JFK finds Kennedy chose not to escalate to conventional or nuclear war, despite the prodding of advisers and Pentagon generals to do so.

By contrast, Lyndon B. Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy, took American troops deeper into Vietnam, with disastrous results.

‘Take out Kennedy and put in LBJ, you get a war,’ Masutani concludes.

Yet, ultimately, the Japanese-born director does not avoid the reality of the fateful events in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

On the contrary, we see the footage of Kennedy’s motorcade entering Dealey Plaza, and the panic that ensues as shots ring out and the U.S. president is assassinated.

‘This has nothing to do with glorifying Kennedy. We just wanted to look at his DNA pattern of behavior,’ Masutani explains.

Set against this search for the truth, the replacement of a tragic death in Fugitive Pieces with an invented happy ending looks kind of sad.