Crying that makes me cry

I wrote a couple days ago about how Michelle Pfeiffer's performance at the end of The Story of Us kills me. I didn't mention that it is also funny. 

Spoilers for Story of Us, I guess, plus necessarily some further spoilers about other movies, but mostly things you probably already know. 

In a tear-strewn, rambling monologue that lasts the better part of two minutes, Pfeiffer's Katie has a sudden realization of what it would mean to give up her husband Ben (Bruce Willis), in the parking lot of the camp where they have just picked up their kids. At first you can't tell if he is unmoved by her display, but if he doesn't appear to be, it's only because Ben had already been through the emotional ringer himself, and at this point is trying to stick to his own dispassionate resolve.

And what a display. We don't get a lot of scenes in movies where a character is crying as fast as she is talking, which is what Pfeiffer does as she goes through a stream-of-consciousness listing of things she loves about Ben, then undercutting them with inadvertent jabs, then explaining that she didn't mean the jabs, then questioning the semantic logic of something she's just said, before returning to the original stream of praise and love that is highlighted by specific examples and anecdotes from their personal history. That Pfeiffer could do this scene in essentially an unbroken take -- there are a few cutaways to Ben just to see what impact it is having on him, though I'm willing to bet her audio was uninterrupted -- then not only is she a great dramatic actress, able to produce tears and memorize lines that she regurgitates basically without taking a breath, but she is also an incredibly nimble comic one, which this movie has also already shown us in spades.

Whew. I think maybe I need to take my own breath.

The point is, even as this scene is funny, I'm crying throughout it like a total jerk, because it is so sweet and so vulnerable and the examples of the things she gives that she would miss if they were divorced are just so fricking on point. (I always think, when trying to be a better dad, how she praises Ben for always doing the voice of a storybook character in a book he reads their kids, even when he's bone tired.) In fact, there's one particular moment after she's been spinning out in reversals and other general babbling, where she starts forward again like she's shifted into a new gear of her crying, and that really gets me the most. 

So that alone made me want to write a post called "Crying that makes me cry."

It may be an obvious observation that a really good actor can set off a good contagious crying jag if we have become invested in the character they've created. However, I'm not even sure that the majority of times we cry in movies is because an actor is crying. In fact, sometimes this makes us cringe. 

In fact, it's rare enough that I am going to try to list my very best memories of this in my own viewing career, which as I'm writing this, I do not expect to exceed ten. (And yes, I've cried more than ten times at the movies.)

With Pfeiffer's feat taking #1 for the purposes of this list -- which I am not ranking from best to worst, but just in the order I think of them -- let's look at the others that came to mind:

2) Toni Colette in The Sixth Sense. I know I've talked about this before, but Colette's reaction to her son telling her that her mother was always watching her performances from the back of the theater? Which is mixed with the realization that her son must be telling the truth and is actually seeing ghosts? Simply lacerating. Perhaps one of my best ugly cries ever, though it's interesting, it did not happen for me the first time I saw the movie, only subsequent times. (What is it with Bruce Willis in movies that make me cry? Who would have thought?)

3) Liam Neeson in Schindler's List. I have a little "comedy" bit I do where I joke about not having done something -- usually something minor, because to joke about something major would not work -- and I use the dialogue of Oskar Schindler: "But I didn't." This, as you will remember, is Schindler's self-recrimination for not doing more, even more than the many things he had already done, to save as many Jews from the concentration camps as he could. And though I'm sort of mocking the performance with this joke, there's no doubt that him breaking down into tears absolutely tore me asunder when I first saw it. 

4) Tovah Feldshuh in Kissing Jessica Stein. Unlike the last two, this is a moment most of you will not know about at all. I'll set the stage. Feldshuh plays the title character's mother, who is having a heart-to-heart with her daughter about why her daughter is currently miserable. The text of her mother's perspective is that Jessica always expects too much from other people, though this is said in a gentle, loving way. Near the end, she finally reveals the subtext, which is that she knows Jessica has been seeing a woman, even though Jessica hasn't copped to it. Feldshuh says "I think--" and then her voice catches in her throat, just for a second, as she chokes back a tear we didn't even see there. "I think she seems like a very nice girl." Jennifer Westfeldt's Jessica has been crying throughout this scene, but that little hitch gets me more than anything Westfeldt is doing, because it's also the reveal that she loves and supports Jessica, even if she might be a lesbian, and Jessica should never have thought otherwise. The accepting of gay kids by their parents always gets me.

5) Isabella Kai and Violet McGraw in Our Friend. There is something about how Casey Affleck says "Your mom is going to die" -- straightforward but with almost a mechanical loss of his ability to get the words out normally -- to his kids in this movie that starts me on the path. But I think the real waterworks begin when I see how these two kids, who should not be able to do this convincingly at such a young age, react to the news that their mother's cancer is terminal. (This isn't the exact photo, since the only version of the exact scene I could find had watermarks on it.) But in that moment, I feel what it is to realize the enormity and finality of death among children who are too young to properly process it, especially when it is the woman who has cared for you all your lives, but soon will no longer be able to do that, or even be around.  

6) Brendan Fraser in The Whale. I know I'm supposed to feel some sort of shame that this was my #1 movie of 2022 and by now I'm supposed to realize the ways I was wrong to love it, but I'm sorry, I haven't gotten there yet. I broke down a couple times during this movie, and though it was actually a moment that didn't involve crying from Samantha Morton that hit me hardest, I can't deny that Fraser's deep emotional breakdowns in this film got me going again. The sort of big, defiant crying-arguing that he does here is actually so desperate, in the way that it utterly scrapes him out from the inside, that it just wrecked me. I'll leave the discussions of the movie's alleged fatphobia to others.

7) Ricky Schroeder in The Champ. This is a movie I really need to rewatch because it would be more than 40 years since I saw it, and possibly closer to 45. I remember this movie being watched at the house I grew up in, so long ago that the TV was in what was my dad's office for at least the last 20 years he lived there. I think my mom put it on. And when (spoiler alert) the boxer dies at the end of the movie, his son's tears are so real that it confronted me with a sensation I'd never had in a movie before, not to mention the idea of how I would feel if one of my parents died. Did I actually cry? Do I remember it because my mother was crying and I thought that was weird? Not sure, but it had a powerful enough impact that I remember Schroeder's acting all these years later. 

8) Kaitlyn Dias in Inside Out. You don't even have to be able to see the actor's face for realistic crying to work. Dias' vocal performance at the end of Inside Out is phenomenal, and it just so happens that she has brilliant animators to help translate it to us completely. There's no doubt that seeing Riley's face slouch into the tears of missing Minnesota is key to our reaction to this scene, but it's the little crying sounds made by Dias, before she even starts getting her words out, that really start us on our path to the inevitable. Then her words just get us there at hyperspeed. 

9) Marceline Rofit in Tanna. When I started watching a movie about a star-crossed romance between indigenous peoples of Vanuatu, I anticipated experiencing the distance of being a westerner who might not otherwise relate to them perfectly well. Fortunately, great filmmaking bridges that empathy gap, and rarely do I remember it better bridged than in watching my #2 of 2016. Rofit plays a child who ends up having an unfortunate role in this star-crossed romance, and at one point we see her weeping while in hiding, ashamed of what she has brought about and overwhelmed with grief. I say "overwhelmed" not because Rofit overplays the scene, and for a non-professional actress, it's rather amazing that she does not (a credit to co-directors Martin Butler and Bentley Dean). Her snuffling technique, otherwise wordless, hit me hard. (Again this is not exactly the right image, but the right image had the aforementioned watermark.)

10) Adele Haenel in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I am having trouble remembering when exactly the waterworks came in my #2 of 2019, whether there was an earlier episode or not until the climactic scene depicted here. But Haenel's quiet crying while watching a performance, at the remembrance of the relationship she did not quite have, is the accumulation of all the emotions that have been welling up in us over the past two hours, and it had this release effect on me. This image was actually on the banner of The Audient for a time, since it is also an audience member watching a performance, though not a movie in this case. (They hadn't been invented yet.)

That's a good place to stop I think. I got to my ten.

As I was scrolling through my top 500 movies on Flickchart, figuring that would give me a good reminder of the movies that had most gotten to me emotionally (even if not all the movies in that top ten are in my top 500), I noted a decent number of examples where I cried, but not because of someone else crying. These were moments of emotional generosity, a reconciliation, a sudden awareness of something unexpected and emotionally devastating, a farewell, things like that. So my idea that there has to be crying involved for me to cry was, thankfully, disproven.

I do feel that if an actor's primary goal is to translate what they are experiencing to the viewer, crying that makes the audience cry is one of the best indicators of success at their craft. I wrote a post on this blog, which I won't bother to link to now, about "yawn acting," and how you know an actor is good at their job if they can yawn in a movie and it makes the viewer yawn in real life. The idea being that only a genuine yawn is contagious, and so these actors are good enough to make their yawns look genuine.

I think yawning specifically may be a bad example, as yawning is suggestible enough that even as I am writing about it, I feel myself inclined to yawn. But that doesn't change my point, which is: crying is the hardest thing for an actor to do well. Some people can cry on cue, but they do it too demonstrably, making a show of it rather than giving us something emotionally relatable. Some people can't cry on cue, and a PA has to come with an eye dropper and simulate a tear sliding down the actor's face.

It's the actors who not only can cry on cue, but make the crying contagious -- who make us cry -- who are really doing God's work in bringing us the emotional fullness of the cinematic experience. And I've just discussed ten of them here.