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. 

The sweet relief of sudden belief

It's rather incredible that M. Night Shyamlan made one of the best horror movies of the 1990s -- some might argue of all time -- and that the thing many of us cherish about it most is a climactic scene that makes us cry.

On Friday night I watched The Sixth Sense for the first time since before 2006 -- that's how far back my written record of rewatches goes, in any case. I want to say it was probably even five years before that, remembering a specific scenario where I watched it shortly after my arrival in Los Angeles in 2001, which may have been my last viewing. 

I didn't watch it because I've just watched (and reviewed) Knock at the Cabin, or at least not directly because of that. There have been about 10 other Shyamalan movies I've seen since my last Sixth Sense viewing, and none of them prompted a rewatch. I did name-check it in my Knock review, but that wasn't the reason either. 

The actual impetus for the viewing was a segment they did on Filmspotting in conjunction with their review of Knock at the Cabin, which was "top five M. Night Shyamalan moments." Both hosts approached their individual top fives in very similar ways, each granting the fifth and fourth spot to an outlier moment from one of Shyamalan's "lesser" films, each selecting a moment from Unbreakable or Signs for their third and second spots ... and both choosing the same scene from The Sixth Sense as their joint #1.

The moment when Bruce Willis learns he's a ghost? No. The moment when Mischa Barton suddenly comes into view in Haley Joel's sheet fort and is already vomiting up some kind of gray liquid the first time we see her? No, that's just a personal favorite of mine. And it's not even the "I see dead people" scene.

Of course I am leading up to talking about the moment in the car between Cole -- let's use character names rather than actor names -- and his mother, Lynn (Toni Collette), in their joint last scene on screen. 

As you will remember, traffic is stopped because there's been a fatal collision between a car and a bicyclist about six cars ahead of Lynn's. Cole knows it's fatal because he can see all the blood coming from the head of the cyclist as she stands outside his window ... and of course because otherwise she wouldn't be standing there at all.

I should pause here to acknowledge Shyamalan's brilliant mixing of tones. Even though I think we know this scene is headed for a moment of reconciliation between Cole and Lynn -- enough of the movie has gone by that we imagine it has to be wrapping up, and he's already said goodbye to Willis' Malcolm Crowe -- we still get a chill from the way Shyamalan suddenly shows us the ghost of the bicyclist outside the car. But we know that this ghost is different, because Cole has looked at her and then looked away. Pointedly, he's not looking at her when we see her.

Instead he's looking at his mother, finally having decided to reveal his big secret to her. 

At first she is skeptical, as you would be. When Cole says that Grandma comes to visit him sometimes, her eyes sharpen and she says "Cole that is very wrong. You know Grandma is gone." As in, "Whatever direction you want to stage these delusions of yours, Cole, leave my mother out of it. That's crossing a line."

But then of course Cole does the thing that characters always do in movies where they offer inarguable proof of what they're saying, which is that he provides information he could only know if what he were saying was true. He describes both the fight Lynn had with her mother before her dance performance when she was young, and a question she asked her mother at her mother's grave.

Of course, the emotional brilliance of this moment is that Cole's grandma didn't tell him what her question was. That's something private between mother and daughter, which is Lynn's to reveal if she wants to. It also allows Collette to perform the emotional peak of the scene that always gets the waterworks going, when she repeats to Cole what her question was:

"Do I make her proud."

I'm getting a little verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves.

The thing that's so great about this moment is that it is accomplishing two things. I'll start with the most obvious:

1) Lynn is getting a catharsis with her mother that she desperately needed. Although it is certainly implied that they had a good relationship, as Cole knew her well and Lynn misses her desperately, obviously there was something unresolved about that relationship for Lynn, as there likely is any time a parent is lost. So a grief at her mother's passing is allowed to pour out at that moment, but this is a different, more nourishing brand of grief, because it allows Lynn to let herself off the hook for whatever shortcomings she imagined she had as a daughter.

But I think equally crucially:

2) It is the sweet relief of realizing her son is not crazy, and that what he is saying has to be true. All this time she has been trying to figure out a way to cure her son of whatever ails him -- and at this point we still think that includes hiring Malcolm as a child psychologist. Now she realizes both that it may not be curable but that it may be okay, since Cole has seemed to learn how to incorporate the wild, sometimes destructive desires of these ghosts into something positive, or at least something he can handle. Her son is going to be okay. 

And then even a third thing:

3) It is indisputable proof that there is some sort of afterlife, and death is not the final stop on our journey.

Any one of these things happening would be enough to overwhelm someone. All three at once? That's something else. 

And Collette gives a performance equal to that moment, starting to first tear up as the realization is hitting her, then climaxing in one of the most satisfying demonstrations of the emotional impact of a moment that I've ever seen on film. These aren't just the tears an actress can train herself to produce. This is the full body experience of being suddenly overwhelmed, including pauses in her speech to summon up the courage to speak a word that's pregnant with significance, even momentary displays of embarrassment about having this sort of reaction. 

I'm obviously not the first person to diagram the effectiveness of Lynn and Cole's final moment -- in fact, what I've written here is probably rather banal to someone who has done a lot of reading and thinking about The Sixth Sense.

But it is the first time I've written about it myself -- that I recall, anyway -- and whether others got there first hardly matters. The brilliance about cinema is that when you are in that moment and having it yourself, you feel like the first person to have that moment -- even if it's a moment you had for the first time more than 23 years earlier.

A few isolated other thoughts about The Sixth Sense:

1) As we are always inclined to do on a second (or third, or fourth) viewing of The Sixth Sense, you watch to make sure that Shyamalan did indeed play by his own rules, never showing anyone interacting with Malcolm other than Cole (and his wife in the opening scene before he dies). The only moment that doesn't fully satisfy me is the quick flick of the eyes in Malcolm's direction that Lynn gives when Malcolm first comes to their house. Since they are sitting across from each other when Cole arrives home, you feel like this is an instance of cheating by Shyamalan -- until you realize that they don't actually interact in that moment, though Malcolm may imagine they are interacting. As she's leaving Cole alone with Malcolm -- or just alone, which is what she would have perceived -- she does quickly look in Malcolm's direction as she's leaving the room.

While this is not proof of anything definitive, I do wonder whether it was a shrewd piece of directing by Shyamalan, or just an accident, or just Collette's instincts as an actress to give another actor in the scene a glancing look as she leaves the room. I don't think it could be option 2 or option 3 so I am going with the fact that it was intentional by Shyamalan, and that it may indicate that Cole's affliction is in some way inherited. She may feel Malcolm's presence in the room even if she can't see it, enough just to make her look quickly as she leaves the room, but not enough to even slow her pace.

2) The scene where Lynn confronts Cole over the butterfly pendant strikes me as interesting, because Cole could have made it so much easier on his mother and himself if he just admitted to moving it -- even if he did not. Instead, he gives her the honest truth, that he didn't move it, without saying who did. This isn't his unfailing honesty toward his mother rearing its head. In the earlier scene where all the kitchen cabinets and drawers were suddenly open moments after Lynn left the room, he willingly engages in the fabrication that he was looking for Pop Tarts. But I think this just shows that his journey is progressing toward coming clean to her. He can no longer engage in simple half-lies as he becomes more and more desperate to reveal the truth of what's happening to him. Osment expresses this wonderfully in his intense look of fear and indecision as to how he should handle this moment.  

3) I caught myself wondering, since Shyamalan has notably revisited Unbreakable in his later films, if he ever considered making a delayed sequel to The Sixth Sense in which Haley Joel Osment plays an adult version of Cole who continues to commune with the dead, and what form that takes for him when he's in his 30s. Especially with the version of Shyamalan we are getting today, this movie would almost certainly be laughable, but I have to admit there is a small part of me that wonders whether it would have the chance to be profound in the same way the original was profound, since it involves the same character and actor. Maybe this is just me wishing that Osment could get meatier roles as a 34-year-old. I did like seeing him show up in The Kominsky Method, but let's just say he is fully a character actor and never gets anything really juicy.

4) Speaking of actors who couldn't capitalize fully on what they demonstrated here, I still can't believe Donnie Wahlberg didn't/couldn't parlay this chilling single-scene appearance into a better subsequent career. He appeared in four Saw movies (maybe that was his first mistake) and then a couple other bad movies that at least you've heard of (Annapolis, Dreamcatcher), but he hasn't acted in a movie since 2011, when he would have been only 41.

I may keep an informal Shyamalan weekend going tonight with only my second-ever viewing of Unbreakable, which will gear me toward finally seeing Glass -- the only Shyamalan movie since The Sixth Sense that I still haven't seen. (And though I'm certainly not watching Shyamalan this year as a viewing series -- I've got enough of those -- it does occur to me that it's probably a good idea to watch the two films before Sixth Sense that I haven't seen.) 

If I do watch Unbreakable, I'm sure I'll have something to say about it here tomorrow.

A sad explanation for Bruce Willis' choices

Two 1990s action icons may have seen their careers end this week -- one by his own stupid actions, and one by something far less within his control. 

Bruce Willis had taken on the aspect of a laughingstock in recent years, a man so indiscriminate in his choices that he might have appeared in a teenager's first backyard movie if there were a couple thousand dollars in it for him.

But aphasia is no joke, and now we may never see Willis in a movie again. 

It was announced this week that the actor has been diagnosed with a form of brain damage that prevents its victim from being able to formulate or comprehend language. Presumably, that includes the speaking of lines of movie dialogue, and the ability to react to other people's lines of dialogue.

It means he's retiring from the business.

It's a sad day. 

Sadder: Apparently he was really being taken advantage of on set. It was clear he didn't know what was going on, couldn't remember his lines, etc. But they just kept on rolling him out there, making money off him. One might argue they did it to make Willis himself enough money so that he would be set once he could no longer work, but I'm skeptical. 

I can't remember where Willis stands in our good graces outside of the bad movies he's been appearing in, whether he's on the correct side politically (I remember some possible Republican leanings) or whether he's a good guy personally (I remember Kevin Smith hated him on Cop Out). I suspect the undeniable charm and charisma he once displayed had long since curdled into something far more toxic. I could look it up, but today is not the day to do so. 

At the height of his powers, though, what a movie star.

I won't go on at length about him as I might in an "in memoriam" piece -- he isn't dead -- but I did think it would be nice to highlight the top five times Willis' star wattage made a huge difference in a movie. That doesn't mean only that a "big name" was needed for the role, or that being a star was what made his performance in it memorable. I could have just called this "top five Bruce Willis roles" but I don't think that's exactly what I mean either. Maybe it is, you be the judge. 

Anyway, here is the list. 

5. Looper (2012) - This was sort of a comeback for Willis as it followed a long fallow period for the actor -- fallow as in not fruitful, though still as busy as ever. Especially paired with Rian Johnson's heady and intriguing concept, it reenergized our relationship with Willis, and Willis did his part to vanquish the accusations that he cared less and complained more. (I suppose he may have complained behind the scenes, but I didn't hear about it.) It's an interesting role in the sense that there is something sinister about it -- there's a moment of very poor judgment that leads to him committing a truly horrific action -- but it all comes from a place of sorrow, informed by all this foreknowledge of his preordained fate, and the loss of a loved one. Anyway, the performance really works for the film.

4. Twelve Monkeys (1996) - Willis really works well with heady subject matter involving time travel, doesn't he? He really communicates the disorientation his character finds himself in in Terry Gilliam's film, which involves trips through war zones, both actual (World War I) and metaphorical (an insane asylum). It's also a performance that eschews vanity, as he's broken and beaten up and sometimes without any clothes. Especially against a performance by Brad Pitt that's characterized by all its tics, you can appreciate how Willis underplays this material, and you really get a sense of his chemistry with Madeleine Stowe.

3. The Sixth Sense (1999) - This was not the first "unexpected" usage of Bruce Willis but it continues his ability to pair up with directors with a certain vision. Willis' work with M. Night Shyamalan was truly of the internal variety -- particularly in their follow-up collaboration, Unbreakable -- and Willis played that perfectly in setting up one of the biggest surprise twists in recent film history. (From which Shyamalan himself may have never fully recovered, artistically, as it set him off on the path that has caused us all to laugh at him so much.) This was one of the first times I remember feeling real pathos for a Willis character, which was present in other of his films but overshadowed by a more dominant tone, such as confidence or wise-cracking.

2. Pulp Fiction (1994) - Less than a decade after he even came on the radar for most of us, Willis already felt like a surprise addition to Quentin Tarantino's follow-up to Reservoir Dogs, and perhaps the first example (along with John Travolta) of Tarantino's knack for 70's style stunt casting, where a big name comes along at the end of the opening cast list to really put a spin on your expectations. Butch Coolidge is probably Willis' second most iconic role, though funnily enough, I just had to look up what his last name was. (Do they ever even say it in the movie?) This role may demonstrate more range than Willis has ever displayed in one performance, from the eternal take of Butch quietly listening to Marcellus' speech, to the anger and frustration involved with the loss of his watch, to baby talk with his girlfriend. This, here, is a star.

1. Die Hard (1988) - Number one had to be Die Hard. The best action movie of all time remains one of the all-time best breakout performances for a movie star. Willis' everyday NYC cop, unwittingly transplanted to La La Land for Christmas, is effortlessly identifiable to the audience -- not because we are police officers or would have any clue how to singlehandedly take down a building full of terrorists, but because John McClane handles every new piece of information with exactly the bemusement/frustration that we would feel, and with the ingenuity we would hope to produce. He's the ultimate aspirational character for a certain brand of audience member, who wants to brave in a time of extreme danger but also knows he or she could end up pulling broken glass fragments out of bloodied feet and praying aloud not to die. 

Honorable mention: 

The Story of Us (1999) - This is a personal favorite that I had to throw in there. It's a different sort of role for Willis, where he plays the estranged husband of Michelle Pfeiffer and the father of two kids. They have a trial separation while the two kids are off at summer camp, and the film considers the couple's present, history, and future together during the course of that summer. I suppose it has the contours of a romantic comedy -- which is actually how we first got to know Willis in Moonlighting -- but it's more poignant and contemplative than funny, and I don't think it produces any easy answers, even if it finishes in a way that feels easier than such a real world situation might be. I love this movie for its ultimate optimism, for the performances (Pfeiffer slays me in a scene near the end), and for its attention to detail, particularly a montage of moments from their history set to "Classical Gas."

All six of those movies were movies I had already tagged on my blog and written about previously. Yep, Bruce Willis has definitely been a big part of my cinematic upbringing. 

As one indication of how poor his choices had been, and how much he was being taken advantage of, he doesn't just have one or two roles in the can, as many actors who are taken from us prematurely do. No, Willis has eight movies in the can. Whether any of them will be worth a squirt of piss, or 90 to 120 minutes of our time, is another matter. 

But maybe we'll be ten percent more likely to watch those movies, and other movies he's made in the past decade, just to appreciate him -- and to see if we can see the signs of this terrible affliction. I regret any time I referred to one of his performances as "sleepwalking" through a movie. It now seems clear that giving those performances was extremely difficult for him, even if it was, at some point, the laziness and disinterest talking rather than the aphasia.

But as I said earlier, today is not the day to impugn Bruce Willis, nor to call in to question any of his past choices. Maybe even the right-wing political leanings were evidence of the aphasia. That would explain a lot.

Until they have a cure, fare thee well, Bruce.

A second chill

This is the fourth in my Second Chances series, which runs every Tuesday. See my Second Chances label on the side for other films I've reconsidered after a second viewing.

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

The chill is an involuntary physiological reaction we experience while watching a movie, when either the images or the music are particularly eerie or foreboding. It essentially relies on our fear of not knowing what's going to happen, and our imagination that whatever happens will be far worse than we imagine.

It's like the physiological response of laughter, in the sense that it relies on surprise to achieve its greatest power. And, like laughter, it would stand to reason that it's not as effective on the second viewing as it would be on the first, since the element of surprise is no longer present.

Why, then, were those chills sprinting down my spine during my entire second viewing of Alejandro Amenabar's The Others?

It's a good question. I should have remembered that the scary bits in The Others are more what's suggested than what's shown, with one or two notable exceptions. Yet I watched that movie this past Sunday in a state of uncertainty about what disturbing images were about to befall me.

As you've probably guessed by its inclusion in my Second Chances series, The Others didn't really work for me the first time I saw it. At the time it came out in 2001, The Sixth Sense was already two years in the past, and M. Night Shyamalan's influence was evident in every horror/thriller you saw. The (spoilers NOW) idea of people you think are alive actually being dead was not only a Shyamalan-like twist, but it was the same exact concept as in The Sixth Sense, even if the setting was vastly different.

But it wasn't just the big reveal at the end of The Others that bothered me, as I sensed myself not liking it as much as I should before that. I think I was also bothered by the fact that the world of the film felt very small, contained, even claustrophobic, as the action was limited just to the house. Add in the fact that not very much happens in the movie, and you've got a little, claustrophobic movie running around in circles in its own tiny space.

Or so I thought at the time.

During Sunday night's second viewing, my opinion of the film was vastly upgraded. Even if I hadn't known on an intellectual level that I was liking it more, I had to trust my physiological reaction, the aforementioned chills. And even if that was due in part to the shriek of violins in the soundtrack, I can't deny that it had an effect on me, and that I found what I was watching to be quite eerie indeed.

So what changed?

I think I appreciate better now some of Amenabar's intentions. The claustrophobia and the narrative inertia, which I considered to be weaknesses of the film, are both, in fact, strengths. If you are a ghost living in purgatory, you would feel a sense of sameness in everything you do, a sense of repetition due to the fact that you can't make new experiences. And from what we understand of ghosts, they are geographically limited in their travels, which is why Nicole Kidman's character gets lost in a dense fog the one time she tries to leave the house.

I also felt an additional eerieness watching Christopher Eccleston's character returning from World War II. He's dead as well, of course, but the difference is that he knows it. This is why his depression is so great. But he recognizes that his family does not know they're dead, and he can't bring himself to tell them. And the fact that they are dead, that she smothered their children, certainly gives him an even greater emotional burden to carry with him to the next plane of existence.

I argued earlier that the chills you experience while watching a movie should be most effective on first viewing. But a movie like The Others (following in the footsteps of The Sixth Sense) has a special value during a second viewing, because it allows you to see the clues and appreciate how they are used to bring about the twist ending. On my second viewing of The Others, I felt like it was plain as day that Kidman and her children were already dead, but I didn't feel like that detracted from the movie. On the contrary. It allowed me to lose myself in the head space of their dreary world, to see the film as Amenabar's personal vision of purgatory, a beautifully appointed purgatory full of gothic imagery, longing and dread.

Amenabar is quite successful at sustaining tension and fear in this film, making us afraid even of a child's drawing of an old woman, with the number 14 written next to it for the number of times she'd seen that particular "ghost." (I'm actually getting chills just writing these words.) The Others is a brilliant example of that minimalism. However, Amenabar did need to give us something corporeal to fear, even if only to please the studio, and that particular scene is quite effective as well. It's the scene where Kidman sees her daughter drawing on her hands and knees on the floor, only it's not her daughter -- it's the face of an old woman in the child's body. If The Others was hurt at the time for following The Sixth Sense, in my personal estimation, then at least it was ahead of the many films that have depicted scary children who speak in tongues in the decade since then.

Lastly I want to praise the three servants in the mansion, who we discover have been dead for over 50 years. The way they glide across the screen, coming toward a helpless Kidman and family, dark shapes with blank faces, is exquisitely scary. Amenabar got that just right, making us fear them without having to go for some kind of inorganic payoff, where they morph into screaming monsters. Their slack faces alone are scary enough.

Second Chance Verdict, The Others: A chilling nightmare and a unique vision.