It’s not a matter of if an audience will cry at Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet but when. In my case, at the film’s Toronto International Film Festival premiere, it happened late in the film, when one character reaches a hand out to another. I’d been surrounded by sniffling and the discreet sounds of people rifling through bags for tissues for several minutes, but that extended hand put at least one audience member several rows behind me past the point of composure. I heard a gulping kind of sob. I can’t pass much judgment, since my eyes were watery enough that I had to remove my glasses, though I managed to reserve my own real sob until the first time I tried to speak to my friend after the screening.
Crying — how much festival audiences have engaged in it, how devastated the weeping was, which cast members succumbed to it during press interviews — has been the major topic of discussion about Hamnet as it’s made its way through the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals. Zhao’s mournful, gorgeous adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, a fictionalized tale of William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes after the death of their young son, is one of the relatively few breakout films from this year’s fall festivals. And the reviews have zeroed in on the film’s emotional impact. IndieWire went graphic with its headline (the film “rips the heart right out of your body!”), while our own Bilge Ebiri deemed Zhao’s film “the most devastating movie I’ve seen in years.” Zhao herself has been moved to tears while presenting the film at TIFF, while Jacobi Jupe, the young actor who plays the titular, ill-fated Hamnet, cried during one of the cast’s many TIFF group interviews.
This assault on audience members’ tear ducts is of course great news for Hamnet and its distributor, Focus Features, which wants to position Hamnet as a top Oscar contender heading into the end of the year. To do that, you need a hook. With vanishingly few exceptions, you can’t win Best Picture without at least one. Anora had its youth appeal, its scrappy upstart distributor in Neon, and Sean Baker on the campaign trail talking about the primacy of the theatrical experience. Oppenheimer had its box-office haul, plus the notion that Christopher Nolan had finally made his magnum opus.
Being the movie that leaves audiences a weeping mess has been a historically winning strategy when it comes to Oscar campaigning. You can go as far back as Best Picture winner Terms of Endearment in 1983, which invited its audiences to “Come to Laugh. Come to Cry. Come to Care. Come to Terms.” Other examples aren’t hard to come by. Titanic is just a big, expensive, thrilling movie about an ill-fated boat without the tragic romance of Jack and Rose (and, I’d argue, the true weepie moment of that film: the Irish mom reading to her kids before the waters take them). Million Dollar Baby is another film living in Rocky’s shadow without its tearjerker of an ending. CODA was far from every critic’s pick for best of the year; tugging on audience members’ heartstrings was that movie’s ticket to the Oscar stage.
At festivals, word of mouth travels fast, and before long, a movie that promises complete emotional devastation becomes the hottest ticket in town. It’s not like seeing Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper together wouldn’t have been enough to draw audiences for A Star Is Born, but once those screenings began, tear-streaked attendees disseminated the soggy news. Other movies with fewer associated pop stars really need the boost of a weeping imperative. Manchester by the Sea ended up winning Oscars for Casey Affleck and Kenneth Lonergan, and I’m not sure that could have happened if the dominant narrative coming out of Sundance that year wasn’t that the movie would absolutely wreck you.
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At Toronto specifically, audience tears can be particularly valuable, since TIFF’s biggest Oscar bellwether is its People’s Choice Award. Of the last 17 People’s Choice winners, 15 have gone on to Best Picture nominations. And often, a People’s Choice winner only needs one or two nose-hair-plucking scenes to seal the deal — the Paula Patton “I love you” scene in Precious or the fate of the poor grandpa in Belfast, for instance.
But there’s a danger to taking the guaranteed-weepie route. For one thing, you risk devaluing the actual movie, reducing it to simple emotional manipulation. Zhao’s meditations on the individualized experiences of grief and the veil that separates the living from the dead in Hamnet are worth more than just a cry-o-meter reaction. The same can be said of stars Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal — her performance emphasizes a full-body rawness, while his highlights his character’s feelings locked inside a life of words. Their skill at accessing such precise and distinct versions of grief ought to be praised regardless of how the audiences choose to express themselves physically.
There’s also the risk that the promise of a tearful catharsis will go unfulfilled. Tearjerkers are similar to horror movies in that way: Good buzz is essential to getting butts in the seats, but you’ll also engender a certain amount of “prove it” energy. Such was my experience with Rental Family, a TIFF premiere and Oscar hopeful whose premise seemed to guarantee tears: An American actor (Oscar winner Brendan Fraser) living in Japan takes an unusual gig with an agency that places actors in real-life situations as a kind of surrogate (a mourner at a funeral, an absent family member). Before its TIFF screening, Fraser told the audience to expect “a love letter to Tokyo, addressed to loneliness anywhere, and sealed with a cherry-blossom kiss.” Then on his way out of the theater, he shouted, “Who brought the box of tissues?!”
Aside from the toxic level of corniness in that “cherry-blossom kiss” business, Fraser was leaning into what Searchlight Pictures likely hopes is a weepie narrative for Rental Family. And yet as I sat through the movie and butted heads with writer-director Hikari’s plotting (it felt both overdetermined and underbaked), I bristled at the notion that any of this would make me cry. Why? Fraser gets hired to play the long-absent dad of a grade-school girl, a setup seemingly designed only for the moment when Fraser is forced to break her heart and leave — a development that is not only foreseeable but part of the plan. Yet, stone-faced as I was, I could hear some sniffles around me. Nothing quite like the surround sound at Hamnet, but there were more than a few people in that room dabbing at their eyes. Which only made me more resentful of Rental Family’s inherent phoniness.
If Rental Family makes the top three in People’s Choice voting, then the joke is on me, and Fraser’s remark about bringing your box of tissues was on the mark. But if it doesn’t, and if Rental Family ultimately gets dismissed as a hollow manipulation, then the strategy will have backfired. In Oscar season, there is a vast distance between the Movie That Will Make You Cry and the Movie That Wants to Make You Cry. Don’t be the latter.
