Tear Time: Movie Scenes That Make Me Cry Like a Baby

I’m not bawling, you are!

Jeremy Helligar
5 min readAug 25, 2024
Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt (Photo: YouTube).

“When was the last time you cried twice in one day?”

That was the rhetorical question an Ohio congressman/gubernatorial candidate asked his aide on Veep after watching U.S. Vice President Selina Myer (played by zillion-time Emmy winner Julia Louis-Dreyfus) break down two times in about as many minutes in the first-season finale of the HBO series.

My answer: Yesterday!

Don’t worry, I haven’t turned into a crybaby overnight. Real life still rarely brings out my crying side, but movies and music can move me in mysterious ways. Sometimes they evoke a memory of some incident that didn’t necessarily make me cry at the time. Sometimes it’s merely the suggestion of an idea that evokes a groundswell of emotion that ends in tears.

Listening to Shelby Lynne’s new album, Consequences of the Crown, on repeat over the past two days nearly activated my tear ducts several times (Dear Criers: Crank up “Regular Man” or “Over and Over” at your own risk), but somehow, my eyes remained dry. Then I started writing this post yesterday, and tears started to roll.

Rereading a years-old email from a friend in L.A. inspired me to write this. In the email, she mentioned having recently seen the 2002 film About

--

--

Jeremy Helligar
Jeremy Helligar

Written by Jeremy Helligar

Brother Son Husband Friend Loner Minimalist World Traveler. Author of “Is It True What They Say About Black Men?” and “Storms in Africa” https://rb.gy/3mthoj

No responses yet