Food bank breakdowns and a father’s regrets
In this series, our writers own up to the entertainment that never fails to bring a tear, or a torrent of them, to their eyes.
People often say that movie critics have hearts of stone, hardened by viewing too many sappy rom-coms, and the relentless murder and mayhem of blockbusters.
And yet, while watching Ken Loach’s new social realist drama I, Daniel Blake the other week, I suddenly found myself trying — and failing — to hold back tears.
Again! The same thing happened when I’d seen the movie the first time, at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or.
It’s the scene, no spoiler here, where Hayley Squires’ character Katie, an impoverished single mom of two young children, breaks down while visiting a food bank in her new town of Newcastle, England. It’s a long wait in a long line to get inside.
Katie has been surreptitiously skipping meals so she can feed her children, for whom dinner is at best a plate of noodles and sauce.
Overcome by hunger as she views the charity’s grocery shelves, Katie pops open a tin and starts furiously eating. She collapses from fatigue and shame, as food bank volunteers and her new friend Daniel (Dave Johns) rush to her aid.
The simple humanity of the moment got to me, as it evidently did the Palme jury, and Loach isn’t just pushing emotional buttons.
The seasoned British filmmaker feels real anger about his country’s dysfunctional and Kafkaesque welfare system that allows people to suffer in one of the most advanced nations on Earth.
Film connects with our essence, what we are or aspire to be as persons, and our individual responses can be as random as a mob.
I can watch marauding zombies rip an innocent victim to shreds in a horror movie and not feel half the emotion I felt for poor Katie struggling with a can of soup.
Sometimes it’s obvious why a film is reaching the tear ducts.
I recall getting misty-eyed at another Cannes film, back in 2001, one that went on to win that year’s Palme d’Or: The Son’s Room by Italian writer/director Nanni Moretti, a maker of movies both personal and emotional.
It’s the story of a family attempting to cope with the sudden loss of a teenage son, Andrea (Giuseppe Sanfelice), who drowned while scuba diving.
Moretti plays the father, Giovanni, who is torn by regret for having missed an opportunity to be with Andrea on what turned out to be his son’s final day alive.
As the father of three children, two of them sons, I had no trouble feeling the power of this intensely poignant film.
I don’t think any parent could remain dry-eyed while watching it, just as no father or mother can read Robert Munsch’s bedtime story classic Love You Forever to a child without yielding to tears, especially when you get to this line: “I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always, as long as I’m living my baby you’ll be.”
Other times, there’s no logic to what prompts the waterworks. For example, I had a completely irrational response to the vampire romance series Twilight.
Kristen Stewart’s human character Bella reminded me of my dear daughter Emily, who is about two years younger than Stewart.
Bella lives with her divorced dad Charlie (Billy Burke), the police chief of their sleepy town of Forks, Wash. They love each other and get on well, apart from the usual parent/child squabbles.
Bella falls for Edward (Robert Pattinson), a pale and moody hunk who turns out to be a vampire, albeit a meeker version than the Count Dracula stereotype.
I’m not giving state secrets away revealing the plot-hinging info, teased out over five long movies, that in order for Bella to marry Edward and be his wife she’ll have to become an undead vampire herself.
Listen, I know that vampires aren’t real — and they aren’t, right?
And I didn’t really care whether Bella or Edward ever tied the bloody knot, or whether she instead ran off with Taylor Lautner’s rival character Jacob, who happens to be a werewolf.
I just felt badly for poor Charlie, who stands to lose his only daughter to the undead world of permanent midnight, clammy skin and protruding fangs.
Bella will never again be the daughter he knew.
If I told you I didn’t get a little choked up on Charlie’s behalf, I’d be lying.
You know that famous Emily Dickinson quotation about love?
The one that goes, “The heart wants what it wants — or else it does not care.”
Tears are like that, too. They roll without warning, even down the granite cheeks of the most cynical of movie critics.
Good thing we do our watching in darkened rooms. Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.