April 23--At the movies, we cry for so many different reasons. The other night I cried at the quality of the buttered popcorn at the Landmark Century Centre Cinema: so tasty, so right. The night afterward I cried driving into the parking ramp of the ICON Theatre on Roosevelt: so free.
What makes you cry (on-screen reunions of dogs and owners; long, cancer-related mother/daughter goodbyes a la "Terms of Endearment"; the mere mention of "It's a Wonderful Life," or the words "wonderful" and "life" in any context) may have nothing to do with what makes me cry.
The right composer can make me bawl. Watching Pixar's "Up" at its 2009 Cannes Film Festival premiere, I took off my tear-stained 3D glasses after the end credits and I felt great. Spent, but great. A critic down the row from me ended up tweeting about my uncharacteristic blubbering. A little jet lag, sure, that had something to do with it. But composer Michael Giacchino's waltzes, coupled with scenes such as the early, devastating four-minute "Married Life" montage ... well, there it was, and there I went. Giacchino's "Ratatouille" score makes me cry, too, even the scenes that aren't designed to make anyone cry.
I thought of crying this week while wholly resisting the manipulations of two determined tear-jerkers, Russell Crowe's "The Water Diviner" and Alejandro Monteverde's "Little Boy." "The Water Diviner" has so much going for it tear duct wise: battle casualties; wrenching separations; stirring reunions. And yet there it sat, emoting for me rather than allowing me my own emotional responses.
"Little Boy" is worse, but more of a splitter, I suspect. It's the sort of egregious, damp experience destined to garner a lot of fans along with its detractors. A relentlessly bullied and humiliating boy moves mountains, actually, in order to bring his father home from World War II. I suspect it'll work with, for, and on, a lot of people, should they find the movie in the first place. Some of us are more responsive to the emotional sneak attack: the way, for example, Heath Ledger played the final scene in the trailer in "Brokeback Mountain." On the other hand, the closing shot of Charlie Chaplin's face in "City Lights," his heart breaking: the highest form of screen acting, the most effective tear extraction exercise the medium has yet to offer.
Here's one I haven't thought of in a while. In July, the Criterion Collection releases its DVD and Blu-ray editions of Carroll Ballard's "The Black Stallion" (1979). I saw that uniquely beautiful film at an age when I was probably my least sentimentally inclined, in my sophomore year of college. In theory a so-called "kids' movie" about a boy and his horse pushed none of my buttons. Then I saw it, and the experience of that first encounter has never left me. The way Ballard finesses the friendship of boy and horse, the feeding scene, the moments, so beautifully scored by Carmine Coppola, on the beach immediately following -- this was it, real emotion and visual storytelling on screen that made room for individual reactions in the audience.
If a filmmaker has interests beyond the mere jerking of tears, then a film has a fighting chance at greatness.
mjphillips@tribpub.com
