The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Is there something in your eye?
One of the strangest things about crying is that it goes in and out of fashion. “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing,” was Oscar Wilde’s reported response to the demise of the angelic young heroine of Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. Yet in Dickens’s day – half a century before Wilde’s, give or take – swishy sentimentality was in.
The Wildean worldview rules at the cinema, and has done for a while. Films that go out of their way to make us cry have often been treated with as much suspicion as films that go out of their way to make us jump. One of Pixar’s lesser sung achievements is the way the studio made it socially acceptable, in the mid-Nineties, for adults to cry during animated films – though we surely feel more comfortable doing so because animation snaps us back to early childhood, when public displays of emotion are hourly occurrences. (I only cried once during Inside Out, though it was for about an hour-and-a-half.) But the weepie – the live-action drama where a visceral, emotional reaction is the whole point – remains a trashy genre. You have Nicholas Sparks adaptations, young adult bookto-screen smashes like The Fault in Our Stars, and that’s about it. Hollywood makes it, but sees it as kids’ stuff. And that is where Derek Cianfrance comes in.
The director of Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines and the forthcoming adaptation of The Light Between Oceans is the master of the modern weepie. If you go into a Cianfrance film and emerge with dry cheeks, you might as well be wheeled straight to the nearest mortician. But formulaic and schlocky he is not: Blue Valentine was a word-of-mouth hit at Cannes and Sundance in 2010 and secured Michelle Williams an Oscar nomination, while The Light Between Oceans had its world premiere in competition at Venice in September. His latest is an adaptation of the M L Stedman novel in which a lighthouse keeper and his wife, played in the film by Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander, find a baby washed ashore in a lifeboat and secretly adopt it as their own.
Moving doesn’t begin to cover it. There was so much crying in the screening, the ushers came in with sou’westers and mops.
I meet Cianfrance, 42, over coffee in Claridge’s in London. The director, who looks a lot like his Blue Valentine star Ryan Gosling, was first handed Stedman’s book by Steven Spielberg, that king of the weepie, at a meeting to brainstorm ideas for his next film. Spielberg told him that Blue Valentine, a wrenching divorce drama, had been his favourite film of 2010. Cianfrance suspected The Light Between Oceans might be for him when he found himself crying on public transport while reading it. “Which sucked,” he says. “Emotion is embarrassing. It’s the worst.”
Occasionally, a weepie comes along that’s big enough to buck the stigma of uncoolness – or at least make being uncool cool for a bit. Millions went to see Titanic
Director Derek Cianfrance, master of the modern weepie, tells Robbie Collin why crying will never go out of style ‘Yes! Michael Fassbender cried in my movie!’