By David Raether
It’s been rough lately, hasn’t it? The past year or so isn’t going to win any awards for The Best Time of Our Lives. What we all need right about now is a good cry.
In fact, crying is good for you. There are a number of health benefits. For instance, crying releases certain chemicals that reduce pain and, oddly enough, help make a person feel better. It’s self-soothing and improves your mood.
It’s also a natural part of our life. It’s the first sound we make when we’re born. We come out of the womb, look around, and our first reaction is to cry. Not that it helps—you’re still stuck with those people who made you. And they’re looking down on you, probably crying, too. Maybe because they realize they are stuck with you. The whole scene is an emotional mess.
And that’s how you start life. One big festival of crying.
Naturally, after such an emotionally wrenching opening, people seem to try to curb their instincts to cry. It’s associated with psychological weakness and intemperance. Get yourself under control, man. Stop your crying. Don’t be a baby.
Well, maybe we shouldn’t stop crying, especially in the face of the almost relentless setbacks and tragedies we’ve all experienced in the past year or so. Perhaps we all need a good cry. But maybe we’ve become so accustomed to not crying (and thinking of it as a negative thing) that we just can’t work ourselves up to a good cry.
Sure, you’ve tried everything. You’ve watched Olympic highlight videos. You tried thinking about your late grandmother’s cinnamon rolls or a field of bunny rabbits. What about that goldfish you had in third grade that died when you decided to give him a bath with your mom’s Herbal Essences shampoo? Nothing.
Let’s face it. What we all need right now are some great tearjerker movies. Here are some favorites to melt our stone-cold hearts.
During the early 1980s, Chris Gardner was running a lab at the prestigious University of California -San Francisco and selling medical equipment he developed there. But then his life fell apart. The equipment he was selling was no longer considered useful due to the changes in medical technology. His marriage fell apart and he ended up homeless while trying to raise his young son. And that’s when he enrolled in a training program at a stock brokerage. It’s an incredible, painful, and ultimately triumphant true story.
Will Smith portrays Gardner in what I think is the finest performance of Smith’s career. It is a restrained, muted portrayal of a man balancing ambition and hope with sorrow and disappointment at every turn of his life. There are a number of quietly heartbreaking scenes that Smith underplays beautifully. And that final scene. Oh my.
This is a coming-of-age tale about an 11-year-old girl, her widowed father, and the boy she first liked and—oh, I’m choking up already. It’s not a particularly subtle movie.
Directed by Howard Zieff from a script written by Laurice Elehwany, this straightforward film moves seamlessly from amusing to tragic. Anna Chlumsky is perfect as the hypochondriac daughter of a widowed funeral director (Dan Aykroyd), and Macaulay Culkin is her oddball and devoted friend. The movie goes earnestly for laughs when appropriate and directly for the tears when that time comes. So is this truly a great film? No, not really. But it is an unadorned, well-told story. And be sure to have a box of Kleenex handy—for you and your kids. This is a great one to watch with them.
Bette Midler and Barbara Hershey star in one of the great tearjerkers of all time about an unlikely lifelong friendship between two women. The story covers their ups and downs after initially meeting by chance as girls under the boardwalk in Atlantic City. Their lives take different paths, but they keep coming around to each other to reunite and then split apart. It’s a tale of the enduring kind of love found in a friendship, one that goes through a number of bumps along the way. This movie is sentimental without being mawkish.
Of course, everyone always loves Bette Midler, but for me, this movie’s real appeal is Barbara Hershey, who’s had a nearly 50-year career in film and television. She always plays her roles with a straightforward but strong emotional quality. After you watch this movie—and cry your eyes out at the ending—be sure to check out Hershey in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) or Woody Allen’s masterpiece Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). This picture was directed by Garry Marshall, who may not be on par with either Scorsese or Allen, but still knows how to hit the audience in the heart. The magnificent soundtrack includes The Wind Beneath My Wings.
All of the Toy Story movies tug at your heartstrings, but this one always gets to me the most. Each installment’s story usually centers around loss in some form or another. Here, the toys are worried about what will happen to them now that Andy is going off to college. He plans to take Woody (Tom Hanks) with him but puts the rest of his toys in a trash bag to be put in the attic. His mom accidentally throws them out, thinking it’s a bag of garbage. Thus begins yet another journey for the toys. This journey is incredibly perilous and ends with a rescue—and then a melancholy farewell to Andy as he gives his toys away to a little girl.
Not a dry eye in the house? How about not a dry eye on the entire planet. The film received a nomination for the Best Picture Oscar. It was written by Michael Arndt, who also penned Little Miss Sunshine (2006), and was directed by Lee Unkrich, who co-directed Toy Story 2 (1999) and Finding Nemo (2003).
James L. Brooks brings Larry McMurtry’s 1975 novel about a mother and daughter’s complicated relationship to the screen. This film is one of those that starts out very funny but ends with heartbreak. The story could have easily been a piece of Lifetime movie dreck, but Brooks’s script and the performances—especially the performances—steer the film to an unforgettable and deeply human drama.
Every actor in the movie gives one of the best performances of their careers here. Shirley MacLaine is particularly outstanding, but don’t overlook Debra Winger, Jack Nicholson, Jeff Daniels, and John Lithgow. If it has been a while since you watched this movie, it’s time to put it in your queue again. It’s magnificent.
Bradley Cooper retells the story of the rise of a young singing star. This is actually the fourth version of A Star is Born, and I think a pretty compelling argument could be made that it’s the best one. If you aren’t a sobbing mess during the final number, you might want to talk to a medical professional to ensure you’re aren’t really a cyborg or something.
One reason this version is so powerful? The screenplay. It was co-written by Eric Roth, who also wrote the screenplays for Forrest Gump (1994),The Insider (1999), Munich (2005), and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008). He was nominated for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for all of these works, winning one for Forrest Gump. Cooper pulls a remarkable performance out of Lady Gaga, who turns out to be a naturally gifted actor—on top of that powerhouse voice.
This is an old-fashioned, black-and-white tearjerker starring Bette Davis and Paul Henreid in a tale of thwarted love. It’s also one of the greatest tear-inducing films of all time, the perfect movie to watch in your bedroom at the end of the night. Time to get lost in someone else’s woes and have yourself a good cry.
Davis plays Charlotte Vale, the drab and overweight daughter of a cruel mother who verbally abuses her constantly. Upon the recommendation of a psychiatrist, she goes on an extended sea cruise to Rio. Charlotte meets and falls in love with Jerry (Henreid) during the cruise, who, alas, turns out to be married. Many more entanglements ensue, and a (sort of) happiness is achieved in the end.
This movie features one of the great lines in Hollywood film lore: “Oh, Jerry, let’s not ask for the moon. We have the stars.” After you’ve finished crying your eyes out, you can gather yourself and quote Walt Whitman: “Now, voyager, set thou forth to seek and find.”
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.
