why was the very last scene of the book not in the film???????????????

[moremojo]

I certainly do agree that the film ends on a more hopeful note than does the story (heck, it ends on a more hopeful note than the story even begins on). Ang was quoted as saying that he wanted a redemptive ending, and got it.

But I suspect that this alone does not account for the absence of Ennis's dreams from the film. I think that was as much an aesthetic choice as it was one guided by thematic or narrative concerns.

[Front-Ranger]

I never got a chance to participate in this thread while our friend moremojo was here, and I'd like to reopen the question here. The last scene of the movie echoes the work of a Japanese filmmaker named  "Yasujiro Ozu, who lovingly detailed the daily domestic world of his middle-class characters, sometimes paying as close attention to the accoutrements of their environment as to the human beings wielding them. His famous 'pillow shots', wherein the camera lingers on a space after the human inhabitants have departed, are a salient example of this." (quoting moremojo)

In a way, both Ozu and Lee seem to be saying that the objects left behind by those departed not only remind us of them but carry on their spirits in some way. The simple everyday objects have a way of telling the stories of these people who went before, so that we can learn from them and apply to our own lives.