Guys Who Cry

Wesley Snipes makes the mistake of trusting a weak friend in New Jack City, the rap version of The Godfather. Gee Money, his best friend, has screwed up and sent his drug empire crashing down. Melancholy and wistful, Snipes ruminates, "Keisha? Dead. The Gunnerman? Dead. Everyone's dead." Gee Money implores him, "Let's just make it like it was! Me and you. Fuck them cars, them bitches! FUCK THAT SHIT, MAN!" The whole time Gee Money is talking, the camera holds on Wesley, tracking a water balloon of a tear as it trickles down his cheek. When it runs over his lips, the feeling triggers more tears, until Wesley's crying his eyes out. Why all the tears? Because it's come down to this: he has to kill his best friend, there's just no other way to handle the situation. It really is a tough life.

It's possible Jon Voight's performance as a disillusioned paraplegic Vietnam vet in Coming Home won him the Oscar because he had such convincing on-screen oral sex with Jane Fonda, but it's more likely he got it for the scene where he speaks tearfully from his wheelchair before a class of prospective new recruits. Out to explode the myth of wartime heroism, Voight starts out soft-spoken and reasonable, meandering through his reasons for going to war. By the time he says, "There's not enough reason to feel a person die in your hands, or see your best buddy get blown away," his breathing has gotten labored, as if remorse came with a respiratory infection. Then he leaps right to the self-loathing that masks his self-pity: "There's a lot of shit that I did over there," he gulps, spilling tears, "that I find fucking hard to live with!"

If ever a character had the right to shed tears of self-pity, it's Mel Gibson's Scottish martyr William Wallace in Braveheart. But as he's getting eviscerated in front of a crowd, Wallace does the opposite--he smiles. Gibson's character in Ransom is not nearly so brave, but Gibson the actor is, because in Ransom he weeps. And it isn't just a quiet, desperate little whimper, either. It's a full-out, noisy, Ted Baxter-gets-fired wail of emotional capitulation, a butt-ugly sob the likes of which couldn't be reproduced if you washed down fire ants on a triscuit with a tumbler of Jagermeister. Gibson can cry with blasted out sincerity and no vanity--even in an action comedy. In the original Lethal Weapon, he stands in his trailer with a 45 corked in his mouth and cries out of self-pity that almost transcends itself with sheer desperation.

Speaking of 45, it happens to be nearly the number of reasons most men had for refusing to see the film adaptation of The Bridges of Madison County. Advance word from the guy-vine was that the movie should come with a sap advisory. I was force-fed Bridges on a transatlantic flight and not only did I, gulp, enjoy the movie, I felt that miserable weasel of emotion burrowing up into my windpipe. Clint Eastwood, who directed this film, also starred. But relax, he didn't cry. Or did he? When Eastwood's character has said good-bye to Meryl Streep, the too-late love of his life, he stands in woe and self-pity as rain falls hard on his bare head and runs right down his cheeks. Only Dirty Harry could get God to do his crying for him.

But my vote for the best scene of self-pity tears goes to Paul Newman in 1967's Cool Hand Luke. The idea that being a man means playing the cards you're dealt, good or bad, couldn't be more richly illustrated or granted a clearer point of view than it is in this film. Newman's perils as a chain-gang convict have included beatings, shackles and solitary confinement, but his lowest low occurs when a telegram comes informing him that his mother has died. Fellow inmates desert the area around his bunk to grant him some privacy and he slowly climbs to the top bunk, where he strums "Plastic Jesus" on a banjo. At the end, he pauses in silence, then starts again, and as he does, he's overcome with tears. Newman's face stays smooth and serene, and then, as if to keep one step ahead of the self-pity hounding him, he changes the tempo of the song, singing double-time. As heroic moves go, that tops eating 50 eggs.

If the cause of a man's weeping isn't grief or rage or self-pity, what's left? Truth, epiphany, enlightenment.

Slick, muscular, powerful as the Trans Am he drove in Smokey and the Bandit, Burt Reynolds is all man in Deliverance. With a single, decisive shot, he puts an arrow through the heart of the redneck who's sodomized Ned Beatty, and he and his friends make a run for it. But all hell breaks loose when the other hillbilly ambushes them as they paddle down the river. When they overturn in rapids, Reynolds ends up with a bone sticking out of his thigh. The guy who heretofore gave the impression that he could have his nuts shaved by a blind man with Parkinson's disease and not flinch, howls like a grandmother. So would anyone looking at that thigh, but Burt's tears have more to do with his sudden, traumatic introduction to vulnerability and impotence than physical pain. His ultimate toy--self-reliance--has been stolen from him. Credit Reynolds for shading a cry of agony with a shriek of frustration. Later in the film, Jon Voight cries his tears back in the warm bosom of civilization when he realizes no warmth can save him from the cold experience of fear and horror locked inside him.

Smashed, freaked-out Martin Sheen is having a bad day in the opening scene of Apocalypse Now. The Vietnam War and his role in it have so completely stripped him of his ability to feel that he rhapsodizes over the cut on his hand, realizing he needs the sight of his own blood to feel alive. At this he breaks down--nude, spent--and sobs with a sound we never get to hear because the Doors' song "The End" blasts over the soundtrack.

Glory, Edward Zwick's excellent portrayal of an all-black Civil War regiment, features two crying sequences involving self-revelation. First, Andre Braugher, the genteel, educated Bostonian, gets rifle-whipped by the drill sergeant when he can't cut the mustard, and weeps to discover, in rage, in sorrow, he's a black man who's risen in white society and still needs white men to free him from other white men. One of Braugher's tent-mates, ex-slave Denzel Washington, later ridicules Braugher for his peevishness: "What're you gonna do now? Cry?" But soon Washington himself is crying. As punishment for temporarily leaving the camp to look for decent shoes, Washington is flogged before the whole regiment. Defiant and determined not to show emotion at the start, he's soon biting the inside of his mouth to keep from crying out. Then a single, well-defined tear courses down his cheek--a tear of enormous complexity. These are the real lashes Washington suffers: here, at the beginning of the black man's emancipation, he is singled out as an example of what not to become.

Speaking of complex tears, there's a brief, mysterious scene in David Lynch's Blue Velvet made up exclusively of them. The sequence begins abruptly as Kyle MacLachlan's Jeffrey sits on the edge of his bed, already weeping inconsolably. In a preceding scene, Jeffrey learned, to his surprise and rue, that he was capable of hitting a woman and now he sobs as he flashes back to that violent moment.

In Five Easy Pieces, pianist-turned-drifter Jack Nicholson has returned to his family upon learning that his father is near-catatonic from a stroke. Having wasted his adult life so far in self-defeating jobs and relationships, Nicholson unleashes more of his inverted self-hatred at home, until, confused and at his wits' end, he seeks out the company of his silent, wheelchair-bound father. As he begins to talk about his life, why and how he turned out the way he did, he becomes flustered, aware that he's facing truths made utterable only because his stricken father can't comprehend what he's saying. Finally, Nicholson apologizes for his life and begins to weep. But as he fingers a tear away from his eye, we see--he's wearing gloves. Just in case we're inclined to think that self-revelation, even with tears, leads inevitably to self-transformation, here is an image to remind us of the limit this man puts on his own vulnerability, and of the hopelessness of his inclination toward a life without commitment.

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