Surprisingly Emotionally Affecting Movies
Just when I was stalling / I heard an angel calling...
Lately, Dame Karen has been watching quite a few movies best categorized as Surprisingly Emotionally Affecting. In the conversation below, Dame Sophie peppers her with questions about the experience of sitting down to watch Something Mostly Light only to be hurled into a tear-filled emotional deep end!
Dame Sophie: So, I noticed the other day that you were talking about having watched Sing Street recently, and how it was a surprisingly emotional experience for you. I’ve only seen it once, loved it, and would love to know — how did you choose this one? It’s such an under-the-radar nutritious bonbon of cinema!
Dame Karen: I was visiting Dave (my partner, who lives in Boston, while I live two hours away in Northampton, MA) and his roommate/our longtime friend Michelle suggested it as an option. I had always sort of wanted to see it but continually passed it by because I’m not really a musicals person and it seemed very Musicals and perhaps Cloyingly Winsome, which is another thing I tend to avoid. BUT, I was in the mood for something light and fun and chose that one, and it is fun but not particularly light at all! It was also cast with newcomers who don’t have that sort of saccharine gloss and labored pluckiness I find so trying in a lot of child actors.
Dame Sophie: Yeah, it’s got lots of humor and heart, and also some crushingly sad stuff, like the female lead being an incest survivor, and the main character’s entire family being horribly depressed. Not a lot of room for Cloyingly Winsome there.
Dame Karen: Right, exactly. And yet there is the Extremely Musicals Fantasy of songs just showing up out of nowhere and being expertly designed pop gems.
Dame Sophie: Are you saying that you doubt that the genius spirit of Adam Schlesinger, of blessed memory, is living inside every aspiring songwriter? I’m shocked, shocked! Given your dislike of Cloying Winsomeness and Extremely Musicals Fantasies, how many of the songs actually worked for you?
Dame Karen: I enjoyed all of them, which I don’t think I would have done just a few years ago, but I’m softer and better able to suspend my disbelief than I was just a few years ago. Like, I’m wondering if I should rewatch Once, which was also written and directed by John Carney and I haaaaaated it. I was all in re: Sing Street after the “Drive It Like You Stole It” scene, which is a perfect send up of a combination Hall & Oates and Joe Jackson song as well as the entire concept of Extremely Musicals, which I realized was a giant factor in ‘80s music videos. Early videos were, overall, either live performances or tiny little movies full of clichés, but clichés WORK and GET YOU, particularly when you’re 15 years old, right?
Dame Sophie: Oh, absolutely! They GET ME even now, which…maybe they shouldn’t? But I’ve always been so ready to suspend disbelief that I’m a ridiculously easy mark for that kind of thing. And now, of course I have a highlight reel from the weird, high concept videos for ZZ Top’s “Legs” and Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers’ “You Got Lucky” and “Don’t Come Around Here No More” on a little loop in my brain’s movie theatre.
Dame Karen: YES! I have also always loved a “kitchen sink drama” and Sing Street is a great combo of one of those and also the power of pop music, friendship, love, creativity, and self-actualization. I got a similar feeling from Billy Elliot years ago. [A bunch of kitchen sink classics are currently running on the Criterion Channel as part of their British New Wave collection.]
Dame Sophie: I snort-laughed when I saw you typing “self-actualization” because that’s a phrase I would think you’d loathe.
Dame Karen: I DO, but here we are, lol! It fits here!
Dame Sophie: Maybe that’s part of your increasing soft-heartedness?
Dame Karen: I think so.
Dame Sophie: We are all on journeys! I want to return to Billy Elliot — which I also love so much, surprise!— and I totally agree, is a classic kitchen sink drama that gets feel-good triumph over near-crushing adversity in just-right proportions. The film is about Billy navigating his identity as a person, son & brother of coal miners, motherless child and future Man of the North of England, and also is about trying to figure out what it is to be all those things and a gifted dancer with tons of potential he can only fulfill far away from home. But it’s also clear in every scene that it’s also about how much pursuing that deeply personal dream costs him and his family.
There are a bunch of moments where the film is very explicit about the Elliot family’s financial struggles, but the most touching one is saved for the final scenes. (My apologies, but spoilers for the released-in-2000 film Billy Elliot are incoming.) 10+ years after Billy gains a full-ride scholarship to The Royal Ballet School, Billy’s dad & brother come down to London to see him in Swan Lake. Both of these incredibly tough men who he looked up to throughout his childhood are beaten down & broken. His dad can barely manage the Tube. And they’ve schlepped all the way down from Durham (a seven-hour bus ride!) to do this, to sit in a darkened theatre and watch this tragic ballet and honor their darling Billy, who it would not shock me to know they barely even know anymore! Talk about literal leaps of faith and love! Our task is not to understand, but to believe & support. I am overcome!
Dame Karen: I know, and you don’t get that with Sing Street, although there is the triumphant sending off on the part of his older brother, which just destroyed me. Brendan, the older brother, and his entire trajectory got me, perhaps as an older sibling myself? His speech about carving a swathe for Conor and being beholden to their parents’ hopes and dreams in a way the younger siblings are not was so heartbreaking! I’m also a sucker for an older sibling teaching a younger sibling How To Live Via Music — see also Almost Famous and the first season of Stranger Things.
Dame Sophie: I feel compelled to mention that I see a pattern emerging.
Dame Karen: YOU?! A PATTERN?! GO ON!
Dame Sophie: I know, I know, I should have checked to make sure you were sitting down before I wrote that shocking sentence. Inconsiderate! I shall be more mindful going forward. The Older Sibling Who Turns Out To Have Unsuspected Depth is really powerful to me. Part of the power of those characters is rooted in my own eldest-ness. Being the eldest means getting to be first, but it also means having to be first. The Brendans and Tonys (Billy’s brother) and Anitas (Almost Famous) of the world are fantasies to me because my little disbelief-suspending brain immediately sees them as my older siblings and they give me a little mental vacation for a couple of hours. I don’t need to think about outside things while the story is unfolding, my fictional older siblings will bear me aloft on a narrative cloud, ahhhh.
Dame Karen: I remain haunted by the mom in Almost Famous telling Anita “You are rebellious and ungrateful of my love.” It’s like the curse of the older sibling coming to terrifying life, springing from the mouth of Frances McDormand! William gets to go on the road with rock stars — their mom isn’t happy, but she lets him go. Anita has to run away with a boy and become a flight attendant, forging her own path with no permission and no support.
Dame Sophie: And lighting the way for William to stroll down it when he’s ready.
Dame Karen YEP! Blessing him with her benediction: “Someday, you’ll be cool.”
Dame Sophie: And she’s right, just not in the way William thinks she is. And then Lester Bangs upends all of that with his immortal line about how the only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone when you’re uncool. Which is also a very important truth. MY EMOTIONS. AGAIN.
Dame Karen: AHHHHHHHHHH!!! THIS IS A LOT.
Dame Sophie: I love these little journeys we take ourselves on. Sorry to everyone who opened this issue thinking it’d be a lark! We hope some of this has been resonant for you, too! How about we close things out for everyone with a wee round-up of Surprisingly Affecting Filmés as a reward for sticking with us and our tear ducts?
Dame Karen: ParaNorman, which Michelle also introduced to me this past weekend. It’s a stop-motion animation movie from 2012 in which a kid can see dead people, is mocked and misunderstood for it, and then has to save his spooky Massachusetts town from a curse. It is INTENSE and DARK, particularly for a kids’ movie, while also being funny and heartwarming.
When it comes to The Power of Music To Change One’s Life, I love:
Little Voice. Brassed Off. We Are The Best! Babymother. Metal Lords.
Career Girls is one of my favorite movies of all time and Sing Street reminded me of its use of the music of The Cure as a storytelling device, which is used as an example of the concept of “happy-sad” in Sing Street. “Happy-sad” is an extreme shorthand version of the entire concept of saudade. See also the use of Brazilian bossa nova music in the 1998 forgotten classic Next Stop Wonderland.
Dame Sophie: I have just a handful to add to this excellent list. I’ll start with enthusiastically seconding Metal Lords and Next Stop Wonderland, and will add another Mike Leigh film to the list. (Now that I think of it, I’ve never seen a bad or even mediocre Mike Leigh film.) Topsy-Turvy is about the challenges of creating the popular art your audience already knows and loves you for, while trying to find a way to do so that is still interesting and creatively worthwhile. Which is to say, it’s about Victorian dramatists WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan writing The Mikado. Like Sing Street, it has huge “hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” energy, which is a big appeal factor for me, as well. (And, like the operetta, the trailer and film as a whole depict the casual & unvarnished racism of the era.)
My other Surprisingly Affecting recommendations are Music & Lyrics (Romcom! Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore as strangers to writing partners to lovers! Songs by Adam Schlesinger! Frankly dangerous levels of personal charm!) and the second season of Fleabag, which manages to make me howl with laughter while also soaking 5 kleenex with my tears, often simultaneously! I love when the protagonist is an absolute mess who becomes slightly less messy without betraying their intrinsic messiness.
Per usual, we’d simply love to know about the Surprisingly Emotionally Affecting Film Treasures of your respective hearts, so please do drop us a line or pop up in the comments!