“Broadcast News” is the great American movie about crying. Then there’s the lone tear that Denzel Washington releases as he is whipped in “Glory”: Two centuries of exploitation in a rivulet of damnation. 88 - under “soup” that movie has so many mighty criers that it’s actually a pool party. We’ve hailed Meryl Streep as our greatest screen actor, but she’s also the Chinese restaurant menu of crying, “The Hours” being Item No. And Anne Hathaway? She brings out the Sir Mix-a-Lot in me: I like big ducts and I cannot lie! Julia Roberts is the divine ripsnorter of weeping. The faucet you forgot to turn off? Jessica Lange. Gwyneth Paltrow becomes an elbow that’s just scraped concrete, while psychosis seems to overtake Mel Gibson until his tears appear to be crying him. Will Smith can seem mad that somebody got him out here looking like this - all tenderized. Isabelle Huppert is a melting ice cap Penélope Cruz a meadow at dawn. Angela Bassett’s face becomes a furious scene of quaking, hazy devastation napalm in the mourning. Tom Cruise muscles out his tears so it’s not crying so much as a bench press. How is she able to work herself into complete, sublingual devastation the minute someone shouts, “Action”? Julianne Moore excels at a dry-heaving style that often settles between an asthma attack and an engine that won’t turn over. Although the body needn’t always secrete. It’s an expression of emotion that only the body can certify. Where did she go in order to come back with this? Among the instruments in an actor’s tool kit, none are more mysterious than crying. She knows what happens when she’s upset, and no amount of fluid shall derail a full expression of the heartbreak whose delegate is facial discharge.Īnytime waterworks overtake Davis, I wonder how she does it. When a dam breaks on one of Davis’s characters, though, she maintains a balance between poise and collapse. The tears in a Viola Davis cry can seem hazardously indistinguishable from snot. Viola Davis, for instance, cries the way I do: with everything she’s got. Actors guide us away from any shame we might harbor over our own weeping: In the relative anonymity of a darkened theater, their crying frees us to let go. These many years of lachrymosity have opened up an immense appreciation for professional tears. The wonder on his face, the circumstantial auspiciousness of that imagery - its fruity vividness - showed me to myself. I was a junior in college Phifer was about my age, and I understood the stroke of profound fortune that whisked his character from drug-dealing, poverty and probable death in Brooklyn to parts West. The hardest crying I’d done since “E.T.” was at the closing shot of Spike Lee’s “Clockers.” It’s just Mekhi Phifer staring at the desert through a picture window on a speeding train. The ones shed for the freeze-framed triumph that ends Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof” for the dissonant moment, in “Avatar,” when James Cameron zooms us, for the first time, around his imperialist 3-D coloring book. Usually, my crying has warranted some explanation - in the first grade, as a movie critic. And what I presume we all experienced was a willingness to give ourselves over to the ridiculous beauty of a story about feeling everything. I’m not the only person who lost it at “E.T.” It was the No. I almost typed “being reduced to tears,” except where is the reduction? Crying for art is an honor, an exaltation, a salute. “E.T.” led me into a love affair with being made to cry among strangers in the dark. What I’d felt was the ancient power of art to make a puddle of us. The minute the movie was over, I wanted to feel whatever that was again. is finally rescued and Elliott, his brother and their friends go sailing through the sky, I kept crying. ![]() I cried, hard enough that the sobbing impaired my vision, hard enough that my poor mother leaned over and asked if we should leave. had gone from brown to ashen, from vibrant to moribund, the way his precious potted geraniums had wilted. Something about the plastic and the tubing and the hazmat of it all just wrecked me, something about how E.T. It was at “E.T.,” after the government seizes Elliott’s house in order to conduct experiments on the alien who has become a member of the family. I was 6 the first time I cried in a movie theater. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
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