A couple of months ago, in a small screening room at the Music Box Theatre, the strangest thing happened: An elderly woman seated beside me grabbed my hand, then, realizing what she had done, quickly apologized, silently, mouthing in the dark: “I’m soooo sorry.” She pressed her thumbs to her eyes and wiped at her tears. I waved away her apology as unnecessary, the universal symbol of “No worries,” and we smiled at one another. My own eyes were filling up with tears, though the dam had not yet broken, likely because my heart was so smashed at what I was watching, I was still processing.
Spoiler alert, I guess:
But it gives away nothing to tell you the Brazilian thriller “The Secret Agent,” which is up for both best picture and best international picture at the Academy Awards next week, ends on a moment so devastating, it’s like taking a bowling ball to the gut. After we’ve watched a father struggle against an authoritarian regime for two hours and try to create a normal life for his young child, there’s a quiet coda: The story leaps forward to present-day Brazil, and the man’s son, now a middle-aged physician, has almost no memories of his father — the only thing he remembers is they once saw “Jaws” together.
At that moment, I wouldn’t dare reach for a stranger’s hand, even absentmindedly, but I couldn’t begrudge someone else: How often do we feel a collective catharsis at a movie now? How often do you hear the audience rustling around for tissues at the same time?
This Oscar season, at least, quite often.
To be fair, I am a crier when it comes to movies, concerts, novels, paintings, YouTube clips of David Bowie and TikToks of zoo monkeys bullied by their monkey colleagues.
My reactions are predictable: Whatever Rothko is showing at the Art Institute of Chicago, I’m a mess, rooted in place. (There’s a reason the Rothko Chapel in Houston, which exhibits 14 of the artist’s rectangles of solid color, occasionally keeps a grief counselor on hand.) Watching David Cromer’s legendary take on “Our Town” at the Chopin Theatre in 2008 became a crash course in brushing at ugly tears without making a scene. But there was also that time, returning to Chicago after a hard trip, when the familiarity of a Gene & Jude’s hot dog burst my floodgates. It’s also hard for me to make it through the end of Michael Mann’s tough-guy epic “Heat” (when Pacino cradles the hand of a dying De Niro) without waterworks. Last August, sandwiched uneasily between thousands in Grant Park, when Sabrina Carpenter invited out Earth, Wind and Fire, and Lollapalooza erupted in surprise, my internal sensitivity switch flipped and, again, tears.
At the risk of sounding overly hysterical, if we’re watching “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and you do not cry when the brass section of John Williams’ score sounds and E.T. holds a finger to Elliott’s head and says “I’ll … be … right … here” — sorry, you may be a sociopath.
Yes, standard Oscar bait has always meant someone losing it over a terminal illness or a loss of innocence or world war, but this year I’ve cried a little at nearly every movie in competition, regardless of the topic. It’s as if movie theaters, steeped in uncertainty and closing daily, have chosen to remind us of the primordial beauty of a collective audience release, a kind of special effect that predates even sound pictures, a response that can’t be understood at home in bed alone watching a movie on a phone. The act of escaping into a theater only to feel your emotions burst wide open at heartbreak or loss, while simultaneously being surrounded by other criers, knowing you’re not alone, can seem so rarefied now that the Salt Shed has an annual winter film series named “Crying at the Shed,” the poster for which is a woman appearing nostalgic and wistful.
Should you dive into Oscar nominees soon: it’ll be difficult not to physically ache for Rose Byrne in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” playing a mom spiraling mentally, unable to right herself; or to feel bereft for Ethan Hawke in “Blue Moon,” playing the playwright Lorenz Hart and looking increasingly sweaty and abandoned as he is pushed aside by partner Richard Rodgers, angling for a greater success with Oscar Hammerstein. Hands go instinctively to tear ducts during the Oscar-nominated documentary “The Perfect Neighbor,” which is assembled from police body cameras and includes footage of a child being told his mother is dead. It’s also hard not to mist over at “One Battle After Another,” when Leonardo DiCaprio’s daughter (Columbia College alum Chase Infiniti) takes up his activism and the soundtrack perfectly drops Tom Petty’s “American Girl.” But those are tears of joy — the same kind generated by that remarkable scene in “Sinners” where a dance floor morphs across centuries, laying out a history of Black innovations in a few minutes.
“Train Dreams,” on the other hand, splits the difference. I don’t remember the last time I sobbed for a minute or two after a movie ended (another spoiler alert), yet it happened. Its hero has lost not only his family but his place in society, and he leans back and closes his eyes and, for just a moment, he admires the natural world and gets reminded that he’s still alive. It’s one of those weepies that only hit at the end, after you stand up and promise not to take life for granted, and for a couple of hours, your street, your town, everything feels new.
Then you go back to being you.
The Oscar nominees I strained to cry at, ironically, were the ones that felt overtly designed for tears, the Norwegian drama “Sentimental Value,” Timothee Chalamet’s “Marty Supreme,” and the Shakespeare drama “Hamnet,” the tearjerker of the year. But the reason my face remained (largely) dry was not that certain movies are more shamelessly manipulative than others — all art is a little manipulative, by degrees. Actually, tearjerkers, as a genre, are noble, albeit with a lousy reputation and a glib name for what is essentially an empathy machine that’s eager to streamline complicated emotions. You might even say, considering the state of the union, the approach of AI and the increasing alienation of perpetually online lives, that tearjerkers have returned on time. The whole point, subtle or not, is an argument for enduring this world, not scrolling past.
And yet, our lives tend not to change through an explosive release of emotion but a smallest look, a change of tone. We’re more likely to feel pensive, not pained. We process regret and loss, and appreciation and love, quietly. You could argue the secret of Bill Murray’s endurance is the melancholy of his Chicago-born facade, lined in sighs, not his humor. “Hamnet,” likewise, is about the tragedy that leads Shakespeare to write “Hamlet.” But the scene in Chloe Zhao’s movie (yet another spoiler alert) that pushes audiences to reach for tissues is not the guttural devastation of a child dying. It’s when “Hamlet” is first performed and Shakespeare’s wife (Jessie Buckley) recognizes her husband turned his anguish into art; it’s the stillness as she reaches out to an actor on stage and the audience around her does the same. It’s an elegant illustration of a connection — made all the more touching because, seated in a movie theater, we experience that very same connection with that distant audience. It’s not unlike after Bad Bunny’s remarkable Super Bowl show, when social media was full of videos showing whole families in tears, but also videos of people in tears because they are watching videos of people in tears.
It can’t be a coincidence that the tearjerker is back at a time when nervous breakdowns are mocked on TikTok, and vulnerability is suspect, and sincerity is considered performative.
Or maybe I’m just soft.
I grew up in the 1970s and ‘80s, tenderized by the golden age of prestige weepies, annual raw Oscar chum, “Brian’s Song,” “Ordinary People,” “Beaches,” “The Champ,” “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Coming Home,” “The Way We Were,” Meryl Streep making an unfathomable decision in “Sophie’s Choice,” Debra Winger dying in “Terms of Endearment,” saying goodbye to her kids. If there was a common denominator for most of those movies, it was the inclusion of sad children, the fastest route to tears. I like to think it’s this conditioning that made me so susceptible as an adult to frequently welling up at movies that aren’t necessarily soliciting tears. If you got emotional at the golden glow around Brad Pitt in “F1,” you probably got a lump in your throat for Val Kilmer in the “Top Gun” sequel; I even know someone who began to ugly cry during the last “Mission: Impossible” movie. It’s not the nostalgia but the reminder that age comes for all. But then again, so does awe. It’s a short walk from standing at the edge of Lake Michigan, feeling overcome at its scale, to feeling your face grow hot during the transcendent gasps of wonder in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
In fact, at least for myself, some of the most satisfying movie cries are about feeling appreciative, not sad. I’ve found myself getting emotional during “Die Hard” because I’m reminded of seeing it with a good friend on opening night; when I shed a tear or two at something as loud and unsubtle as “Mad Max: Fury Road,” or “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” it’s likely because I’m floored at the creative ambition, pulling together perfectly. (Indeed, there’s a name for being physically overwhelmed by art, the Stendhal syndrome, though its side effects are less about goosebumps than fainting and feeling short of breath.) There’s little nuance to Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson’s Oscar-nominated “Song Sung Blue” — there’s tragedy, death, crushed dreams, sad children — but it’s the recognizable portrait of a declining middle class (in Milwaukee) that’s moving.
We carry our day into a movie.
Today, feeling older, that means age sets me off the easiest.
I could soak for weeks during the holidays alone, starting with John Huston’s “The Dead,” his 1987 adaptation of the James Joyce story, set at an Christmas party, its tables full of relatives long dead; which leads me to “Meet Me in St. Louis,” about a family splintering; which brings me to “The Family Stone,” in which a character weeps while watching “Meet Me in St. Louis,” knowing it will be the last year her own family will be together. An old movie in which a character cries at old movies takes an even faster path to tears, yet even then, age is the subject. That’s why Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Vivre Sa Vie,” tears streaking her face in a dark theater, watching 1928’s “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” is among cinema’s most indelible images. It’s why Matthew McConaughey as an astronaut in “Interstellar,” catching up with decades of unseen messages from his kids, unable to console himself, remains a meme after a decade.
It’s why we still cry at productions of “A Christmas Carol,” “Romeo & Juliet” and “Our Town,” despite being familiar with the stories, the characters and knowing the dialogue.
Good, bad or meh, any movie, painting, song that strikes you on some gut level, for whatever reason, drags behind it the ghosts of ourselves, the past, future and present. But I don’t know what’s scarier, reaching out into a movie house and hoping to grab a stranger’s hand in solidarity, or reaching out and not finding anyone there to cry with.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com