As Ed and Hi leave the baby they've stolen back with the rightful parents, their future is uncertain at best. Nathan Jr.'s dad tells them that they had best sleep on it before they decide to call it quits, as he looks up at the ceiling and ruminates about life without his wife. "I do love her so," he says with so much feeling that you believe he is a real person and that he really does love this woman more than life.
The movie ends with Hi recreating a dream he has that night. It's the greatest voice-over in the history of movies, and one would wonder how in God's name Nicholas Cage failed to win every award in Hollywood for what he does in this movie. He's never been better. He couldn't be.
"That night I had a dream. I dreamt that I was as light as the ethre, a floating spirit visiting things to come. The shades and shadows of the people in my life wrestled their way into my slumber. I dreamt that Gale and Evelle had decided to return to prison. Probably that's just as well. I don't mean to sound superior, and they're a swell couple o' guys, but maybe they weren't ready yet to come out into the world.
"And then I dreamed on, into the future, to a Christmas morn in the Arizona home where Nathan Jr. was opening a present from a kindly couple who preferred to remain unknown. I saw Glen, a few years later, still havin' no luck gettin' the cops to listen to his wild tales about me 'n' Ed. Maybe he threw in one Pollack joke too many. I don't know.
"And still I dreamed on further into the future than I'd ever dreamed before. Watching Nathan Jr.'s progress from afar; taking pride in his accomplishments as if he were our own; wondering if he ever thought of us. And hoping that maybe we'd broadened his horizons a little, even if he couldn't remember just how they'd got broadened.
"But still I hadn't dreamed nothin' about me 'n' Ed. Until the end. And this was cloudier 'cause it was years, years away.
"But I saw an old couple bein' visited by their children, and all their grandchildren, too. And the old couple wasn't screwed up, and neither were their kids or their grandkids. And I don't know: You tell me. This whole dream; was it wishful thinking? Was I just fleein'
reality, like I know I'm liable to do?
"But me 'n' Ed, we can be good, too. And it seemed real. It seemed like us. And it seemed like, well . . . our home . . . If not Arizona, then a land not too far away, where all parents are strong and wise and capable, and all children are happy and beloved.
"I dunno. Maybe it was Utah."