Actors seldom let tears into their performances, so those brave moments when they do-Brad Pitt's weeping in Legends of the Fall, Matt Damon's cathartic cry in Good Will Hunting-are all the more interesting to examine.
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We men, ain't we? We come with whiskers, hard looks and all that humankind has accomplished in its tiny filament of history--fire, cars, the rise and fall of Communism, 500 channels--swinging in a soft sack between our legs. We got balls, willpower and a pocketful of excuses we never use because we take it like men, straight-up, no ice, no blindfold.
Yeah, we men, all right. But as good as we are at it, actors are better. They love better, think faster, fight tougher, stand taller and die prouder than any of us could ever hope to. And some of them have the Oscars to prove it. Truth be told, you go up against an actor and you're gonna be out-manned in every way except one: tears. When it comes to crying, an actor can't hold a hankie to you or me. We beat them at crying for the very reason they beat us in everything else--because they, like us, are men, and a man does his best crying not in front of cameras, but in private, where he is free to act on the wisdom of... well, a woman.
Just after he was nominated for his role in Fargo, William H. Macy told me how much he disliked the idea of crying on-camera. "In real life," he said, "when something bad happens and a guy's standing over a body, or whatever, it isn't a lot of crying. In real life you're too busy trying to figure out what to do. You're already working on a plan." Spoken like a true dude--or a guy in denial. Because crying is a plan. Every woman is familiar with the revelatory properties of tears, and the ugly little secret is that men are, too. With all those liquid brain chemicals rushing into dry riverbeds of despair, you see it all clearly. Lying solitary in bed, looking up at the red light of the smoke detector plugged in the ceiling and bawling your eyes out--man, you are the poet laureate of all lucidity, which is Sorrow. Just don't be reading that sonnet in public.
Tears are linked with Need, a condition biologically predisposed to females, as in a womb to fill, a kingdom to destroy, shoes to find for that hard-to-match teal dutch. Men must be intrepid, as in hunting big game, proving the world isn't flat, cornering the market on silver. During the great gaseous emancipation of gender issues over the last few decades, a hole appeared briefly in the masculine ozone level. But somewhere between Burt Bacharach and Woody Allen things got way out of hand, and now, with the stock market working itself up to an orgasmic five figures, men must be all they can be again.
What all this means for male actors, whose job it is to approximate real emotions (and sleep with their costars), is that when some screenwriter sets them up to cry onscreen, they're left with precious little material to borrow from, other than TV evangelists or their own personal experiences--which, they well know, are a private affair. Fortunately for actors, when it comes to crying and males, art mimics life--men are rarely asked to cry in films, and hardly ever to shed wet tears.
It follows then, that if you want an actor to cry, you'd better give him a good excuse. Like grief. Or pain. Or rage. Or self-pity. Or end-of-the-line self-revelation. Who knows how many directors have tried to convince actors to cry, but only those armed with incontrovertible reasons have ever succeeded, and probably not many of them have squeezed out more than one tear every 10 tries.
Unless, of course, we're talking about Francis Ford Coppola and The Godfather. Sicilians, he seems to have convinced his cast, wear their emotions on their sleeves. Coldblooded assassins, unfeeling capos? Look again. More tears are shed by the principal characters in The Godfather than blood, and for all kinds of reasons. The first time is when Johnny Fontane, distressed because he can't get a part in a movie, comes to Brando for help. "Oh, Godfather, I don't know what to do," he whimpers burying his head in his hands. Brando leaps up and affectionately bitch-slaps his godson. "You can act like a man! Is this how you turned out? Hollywood hero who cries like a woman?" Second time: the film producer who won't give Fontane the part is served a horse's head in bed and sobs not only like a woman, but a woman who's slammed her thumb in a car door. Third time: when assassins ambush Brando at a fruit stand, Fredo weeps like a little boy, squatting next to the fallen don in denial with a .38 dangling impotently from his ring finger until he cries out, "PAPA!" Fourth time: Brando, lying wounded in a hospital bed, weeps tears of joy when favorite son Michael takes up his hand, kisses it and professes, "Pop, I'll take care of you. I'm with you now." Fifth time: Tom Hagen cries when he's misinformed by his abductors that Don Corleone is dead. Sixth time: the Don and Hagen share a cry when Hagen informs the Don that Sonny is dead. Seventh and final time: the Don looks over Sonny's bullet-riddled corpse with a pinched smile, fights for composure and laments, "Look, how they massacred my boy." Here, admittedly, Brando's tears don't well or fall, but he gets an assist from the plumbing in the background--we can actually hear the dank, lonesome drip of a faucet.
Sicilians, Coppola and The Godfather aside, the situations that bring an actor to tears are discreet and limited. Grief is one acceptable reason. In 1941's shameless tearjerker, Penny Serenade, Cary Grant's tears of grief are an early though not very encouraging example. A leading man if there ever was one, Grant revealed more of himself and connected better with actresses on the screen than almost any other actor of his time. But he didn't usually allow himself to be vulnerable or to indulge in sentimentality or to court pathos. Penny Serenade, in which he and Irene Dunne adopt an adorable baby girl, provides the rare occasion when he went for all three. Having lost his job and been presented with a court order that would take the child away, Grant pleads before the bench: "We love her, Judge. Please don't take her away from us. I'll do anything. I'll work for anybody." As he speaks, his eyes pulse with the sparkly brilliance of tears. But when his voice breaks, it's with all the sincerity of a secretary trying to talk herself out of a speeding ticket.
The quintessential instance of male grieving takes place in the 1993 film Shadowlands. Why is this scene so remarkable? First, a kid also weeps in it. Second, the man is shedding tears not just over the death of the woman he loved, but over the death of the only person he ever loved. But most important, the man playing the grieving man is Anthony Hopkins. In the scene, the boy so achingly misses his mother he's gone up to the attic to sit alone in despair. Hopkins comes upon him and sits down next to him. "I sure would like to see her again," the child weeps. "Me too," says Hopkins, pulling him close, "me too." Then, as Hopkins tries to say something else--to the boy, to the dead woman, to God, or to himself--he chokes so profoundly on his sorrow that for the next 20 seconds he can't get the sound coming out of him to form a word, and tears pour from his eyes. Talk about seeing the red light in the smoke detector--Hopkins is seeing it all here. Whatever he used for inspiration for this scene should be bottled and fed intravenously to unrepentant serial killers, I.R.S. auditors and the Swedish.
Often when a man cries on-screen it's out of rage more than grief, or even just rage, as if the only way he'll reveal the sensitive side of himself is to back it up with a Mayday-type display of anger. Crime boss Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday sets the pace for lacing tears of grief with tears of rage when his cronies usher him into the place where his best friend has been murdered. "Me and Colin was really close ... I've known him since school," he laments over the gentle gurgle of a Jacuzzi (Colin was killed in a health club). Then, as his voice begins to break, his eyes rim with tears and his facial muscles uncontrollably dance that familiar cha-cha of sorrow. Fortunately, Hoskins quietly turns his radish-shaped head away. Nobody should see Bob Hoskins, an otherwise terrific actor, weep actual tears--it's like putting taffeta on a bulldog.
Both Gene Hackman and Ernest Borgnine cry more visible tears of grief and rage in the pre-Titanic ocean-liner disaster classic The Poseidon Adventure. When Stella Stevens, on vacation with her policeman husband Borgnine, dies in a fall, Borgnine whirls into a grief-stricken rage and blames tough preacher-man Hackman for leading them all astray. If ever a face were designed for the shedding of tears, it has to be Borgnine's, which expands outward from the rivet of his nose into four or five dimensions' worth of facial lines, bending the very light around him. "YOU! PREACHER!" he assails Hackman hoarsely. "My Linda! You killed her!" But Borgnine can't sustain the focus of his hatred and succumbs to the kind of heaving associated with salmonella, sobbing his jack-o'-lantern face off in front of not only Hackman, but Carol Lynley (in suede hot pants) and two children.
Hackman is not nearly as indiscreet. After Shelley Winters, seen earlier dog-paddling in an evening dress, saves him from drowning, then suffers a coronary and expires in his arms with the stingy, obstinate expression of someone refusing to let go of her last Kit Kat bar, Hackman centers his consciousness in his Adam's apple, pulls Shelley close, and with a hot, angry smile, weeps and rails to the Almighty: "Oh, God, not this woman! Not this woman." The moment is postscripted by a quantity of sea water dribbling out of his contorted mouth.
One big reason actors don't like to cry on-screen is what it does to your face. At full bore, you look like one of the villains in Dick Tracy or one of the victims in The X-Files, or God forbid, like Ernest Borgnine in The Poseidon Adventure. The strange thing about James Dean is that he looks good even when he's crying. Maybe that's what gave him the courage to take the great leap forward in cinematic male crying. To be fair, James Dean was probably responsible for every obnoxious, narcissistic, mea culpa guy who later allowed himself to be dragged off to sensitivity training, but he still deserves credit for taking crying out of the closet back in the '50s. As we've seen, actors cried in film before he unleashed his tears of teen rage in Rebel Without a Cause, but little Jimmy was one of the first to successfully convey it as a process, a way of getting through shit.
A half drunk, misunderstood outcast with a hawkeyed mother and a henpecked father pressing on him as he faces the music at the local police precinct, Dean smashes his fists into a desk until his ostensible reason for the tears spilling over his exquisite cheekbones is physical pain. He cries a second time during a big family quarrel when his father won't stand up to the psychological tyranny of Mom. Seething majestically in that signature watermelon-red jacket, Dean becomes a locomotive of rage and hurt, his pupils blazing as he implores Dad to back him up. A guy in tears has never looked so good.
Dean's reincarnation in the '90s, Brad Pitt, also looks terrific in tears and has an even greater willingness to shed them. He weeps more than any leading man working in movies today--and invariably comes across as deep while looking marvelous. His full-on, grief-stricken crying sequence at his brother's grave in Legends of the Fall has the gorgeous clarity of a Vermeer painting, and that's just one of five tear jags he goes on in that film. His neurasthenic beauty is one bloodless heartbeat from tears throughout Interview With the Vampire, but he cries actual tears twice, when he brings little Claudia to the place where he turned her into a vampire and when he tells the journalist played by Christian Slater about Claudia's demise. "So, a vampire can cry," says Slater, who could just as easily be talking about a movie star. "Once, maybe twice in an eternity," Pitt replies. In The Devil's Own, about which he must have cried some justifiable tears offscreen, Pitt sheds an inexcusable tear when, confronted by surrogate father NYPD cop Harrison Ford, he admits he's a terrorist and suggests that anybody with half a heart would be too, if they'd gone through his traumatic experience.
Scrutinized in the least forgiving light, most instances of men crying on-screen could probably be crammed together under the heading of self-pity. Sometimes, though, the tears are, like Pitt's in The Devil's Own, self-pity, plain and simple. That sad, heroic, defeated guy on the screen has rolled up a big fat spliff of woe and is inhaling deeply.
In 1941's Meet John Doe, Gary Cooper stands on the roof of a building, double-crossed and exposed in the ruse of claiming he'd commit suicide over the plight of the common man. Now contemplating suicide for real, Cooper slowly turns towards the crowd, his face darkened by the brim of his hat, his eyes filled with tears that sparkle like wet diamonds. At that moment his complete desperation makes him morally superior, no matter what he's done or how much self-pity he's put on it for icing. In other words, meet Frank Capra, who did for Kleenex what July does for Haagen Dazs. Meet John Doe is just one of the Capra films in which actors cried tears that were way ahead of their time. Jimmy Stewart did what is now sacred self-pity-laced weeping in Capra's It's a Wonderful Life.
Eli Wallach's self-pity in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is far less endearing than anything in a Capra film, and much less likely to produce tears in the audience. After lying, cheating, double-crossing, robbing and killing for money, Wallach retreats to a monastery run by his priest brother, whom he hasn't seen for nine years. The sullen, aloof priest tells him that their father has been dead for years and that he's just returned from burying their mother. Greasy insouciance trickles out of Wallach as he slowly turns away from the camera.
"And you?" the priest asks. "Outside of evil, what else have you managed to do? It seems to me you once had a wife someplace--" At this Wallach pivots and sneers, "Not one! Lots of them!" His pudding-colored eyes are stormy with tears. Pinching off his runny nose with his dirty fingers, he bristles with anger--at himself for wallowing in what he knows is self-pity. But then he serves up a second helping of the same: "Where we came from, one became a priest or a bandit," he growls. "You chose your way, I chose mine." Now Wallach jerks a thumb at his chest. "Mine was harder!" You go, girl.
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.
Sometimes we need a little help to see things clearly, somebody else to open the floodgates for us. Check out Timothy Hutton's remarkable crying scene in 1980s Ordinary People. The teenager Hutton plays has a man-sized problem: he survived a boating accident in which his older brother died, and his mother's grief is so great that she has emotionally abandoned him right when his own guilt and loss are too great for him to deal with alone. Only a cardigan-wearing shrink can get you through something like this, and Judd Hirsch indeed helps Hutton identify the source of his guilt and pain. The big breakthrough session is a catharsis of shouting, resentment, confrontation, enlightenment and, finally, tears. Hutton and Hirsch embrace, and those of us in the audience who are affected by this sort of material in the hands of terrific performers need a week to recover.
Now check out last year's Good Will Hunting. Matt Damon plays a young janitor with an impossible math problem he knows how to solve and a rotten boyhood he can't. Robin Williams is the cardigan-wearing shrink who helps him confront his past, thereby allowing him to give up his mop and love his girlfriend for the rest of his life. The big breakthrough session is a catharsis of shouting, resentment, confrontation, enlightenment, and, finally, tears. Damon and Williams embrace, and those of us in the audience who are affected by this sort of material in the hands of terrific performers need two weeks to recover. If you're gonna borrow, you'd better make it better, and Damon, with his uninhibited performance, did just that.
A friend of mine told me about a girlfriend of hers who uses crying to manage her emotions. "Something bad happens to her, something she can't deal with. She has a good cry, feels better, and tackles the problem." Would the world be a better place if men could weep that easily and effectively? Certainly, baseball games would be longer than they already are. Wall Street would not be a pretty sight. Perhaps sometime in the distant future, an evolution in guyness will occur allowing you to wail at will like a mother at her only daughter's wedding. But just in case evolution has its reasons for keeping guy eyes drier, just remember that we men are not nearly as tearless as Hollywood would have us seem. Next time you see that tiny crimson light of the smoke detector flickering above you, just remember this: tear duct for tear duct, Olivier at the height of his career couldn't match you, the Dylan of despair, alone with your grief. 'Cause we men, ain't we?
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Michael Angeli interviewed Joaquin Phoenix for the March '98 issue of Movieline.