Awesome / Death Becomes Her

• At the climax, Ernest is hanging by his braces over a huge plunge to near-certain death. Madeline and Helen insist that he drink the potion, as it's the only possible way he can survive. Ernest takes the lid off, brings the bottle to his lips... and then Madeline and Helen make it clear that the only reason they want him to drink the potion is so that he can maintain them for eternity. Ernest puts the lid back on the bottle and defiantly drops it to the ground below.
  Ernest: I'm sorry, dears. You're on your own. [His braces break, and he falls]
• The fact that while Ernest did die eventually while Madeline and Helen lived on (the ladies even snickered at his funeral), as his pastor so put it, he found something better than immortality: a legacy! He may not have achieved fame or celebrity, but he accomplished so much more in thirty years than they ever will in their eternal existence. In the end, it seems Ernest got the last laugh on them.
  • It's revealed that Ernest completely turned his life around — conquering his alcoholism and impotence, remarrying happily, and fathering numerous children (while adopting many more). And then, he worked on helping other people who were going through the same things he did. He truly earned his happy ending.
  • Better still, remember what Lisle said about how everyone who drinks the potion can only experience 10 years of a perfect life before disappearing from public forever? Ernest got to live about four times that! He lived out 37 years of happiness and family and career, while Helen and Madeline have to live out the rest of their existences in obscurity.
    • And they're stuck together in a miserable, bitter existence, forced to depend on one another as they can't reveal the truth of their new forms and Lisle has banished them from the Secret Order. So their bodies are barely held together with household items like tape, glue, paint, and such things, which is shown when they fall down the stairs outside the church while leaving the funeral and their bodies have completely broken apart by the time they reach the bottom.