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I love sad movies. It’s weird, but a good sad
movie actually makes me feel better; it’s like the story absorbs my shitty
feelings and attaches them to a something fictional instead of whatever chaotic hell
storm of emotion is currently raging in my brain. You know how sometimes
cheering up a friend when you feel sad yourself makes you feel better? It’s
like that.
The movies below are my favorite emotional
shit-shows not simply because they are sad but because they creep into the crevices
of your psyche and stay there forever. Like aneurisms that kill you softly.
The most powerful works of art are those that
affect who you are, how you live, and/or what you understand about the human
condition. The best sad movies are ones you don’t forget because, well, you can’t.
The
movies below broke my fucking heart.
Requiem for a Dream (2000)
I know a lot of people who first watched Requiem
for a Dream with a group of friends. I don’t know how they did it without
everyone in the room feeling like they all just experienced the same tragic
crisis, like surviving an airplane crash or being subjected to an old man
jerkin’ it on the subway. Requiem for a Dream is a story about four people from
Coney Island whose lives are destroyed by the very drugs they took initially to
achieve their goals. What makes this story sad is not simply the devastation that
addiction causes, but how far people are willing to go to be happy, to satisfy
that core “dream” we all harbor inside, how we can so easily destroy ourselves
in pursuit of it. This movie isn’t about our addiction to drugs. It’s about our
addiction to dreams.
Dancer in the Dark (2000)
Lars von Trier is a sad man who makes very, very sad
movies. Dancer in the Dark is a film about a Czechoslovakian immigrant named
Selma, who works long hours at a factory in rural Washington to save up money
for an operation to save her young son’s eyes from a hereditary disease that
causes blindness. Slowly going blind herself, Selma deals with the grim nature
of her fate by escaping into whimsical fantasies wherein she’s the star of her
own musical. The movie is, in fact, a musical, but it’s the saddest fucking
musical you’ll ever see. “In a musical,” says Selma softly, “Nothing dreadful
ever happens.” The irony in this statement becomes harshly clear once the movie
ends and you’re left red-eyed, breathless, and clutching your torso in fear
that your heart might just fucking explode out of your chest.
Fun fact: Lars von Trier’s dedication to capturing authentic
emotion from his actors is, well, a little insane. For starters, he manipulated
Bjork into acting in Dancer in the Dark. Keeping his true intentions hidden, he
originally only asked her to create the music for the film. After she did so,
he threatened to not use ANY of it unless she played the role of Selma as well.
Afraid that her work would go to waste, she reluctantly agreed. On set, they
had a relationship so contemptuous that Bjork experienced daily the very
martyrdom that was written for her character to endure. Cruel stunts like this
were apparently common for directors involved in the
Dogme95
movement, for the sake of the art!
God, how miserable. I love it.
Fat Girl (2001)
Brought to you by another brilliant and cruel Dogme95
director (Catherine Breillat), Fat Girl is a disturbing coming-of-age story
about a twelve year-old girl named Anais who is burdened by a lack of
self-esteem, a compulsion to overeat, and a rivalry with her attractive,
promiscuous older sister, Elena. Through Fat Girl, Breillat delivers one of the
most honest portrayals of the plight of the fat girl I’ve ever seen. The love
and attention that Anais so desperately craves, Elena takes for granted. On a
family vacation the sisters meet Fernando, a charming Italian college student
who’s determined to seduce Elena. The results of this provocative and troubling
experience precede tragic events that reveal the horrific reality of what Anais
has come to understand about sex and love. The angst in Fat Girl will ring
true for any girl that grew up with eating issues, depression, or a bitch of an
older sister.
Synecdoche, New York (2008)
Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York stars
Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden, a theater director who’s struggling with his relationships,
health, and work. His quest to solve these problems influences the increasingly
complicated nature of his new artistic endeavor, a play meant to be his magnum
opus, a theatrical reproduction of his life. He hires a cast of actors to live
out the lives he’s scripted for them in a massive structure housing a
replication of the city outside its walls. This “play” causes elements in his
real life to change, which in turn causes elements in the play to change, and
on and on, until Caden’s reality and the play become indistinguishable.
Synecdoche, New York’s sadness derives from its postmodern view on life.
“What was once before you - an exciting,
mysterious future - is now behind you.
Lived; understood; disappointing. You
realize you are not special.
You have struggled into existence, and are now
slipping silently out of it.
This is everyone's experience. Every single one.”
Jesus, Charlie Kaufman. Thank you your totally not-depressing interpretation of human life.
I guess the reason it seems sad to us is because we're narcissistic creatures, we're the star of our own
movies. We cling to the notion that we matter, and we are afraid of death. I
think one of the sad implications in Synecdoche, New York is that we are so
obsessed with our mortality that we miss out on living; a life spent in
obsession with its preservation is not a full, meaningful life.
TL;DR: Your life has no meaning and you will die one day.
The Elephant Man (1980)
“I am not an animal. I am a human being.” For anyone that’s ever felt like
an outcast, or a freak, or a monster, the Elephant Man will make you feel
better about your circumstances. Whatever bullshit you’re dealing with pales in
comparison to what John Merrick had to deal with on a daily basis in this emotionally-devastating
drama. The feeling you get watching this
movie is similar to how you feel when you witness a pregnant women getting hurt or a grown man trying not to cry in public. Watching bad
things happening to good people is one thing, but watching an innocent, fundamentally
moral person suffer permanently from an affliction that severely hinders his
ability to ever be loved or to even be treated as a fellow human being—well,
FUCK.
Mary & Max (2009)
And you thought a Claymation couldn’t make you cry
– hah! The story’s about an 8 year-old girl with an alcoholic mother and a middle-aged
obese man with depression and Asperger’s Syndrome forming a friendship through
snail mail, each learning important things about life through the other. The
premise itself is cute and seemingly light-hearted, and I won’t spoil it for
anyone who wants to watch it, but shit gets real. Real in a miserable kind of
way. The kind of sadness evoked from this movie is the hopeful, “having-to-accept-painful-things-that-happen-in-life”
kind of sadness. I honestly think the Claymation contributes to the empathetic
connection between character and viewer. Kinda like how we all wanted to die
after watching
Sad Kermit (how can something that looks so cheery be so unbearably depressing?).
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Have you ever told someone you loved that you
wished you’d never met them? After watching this movie, you will seriously
reconsider saying that ever again. Watch Joel and Clementine fall in love,
watch them fight, watch them fall apart, watch them wish they could erase each
other from their memories completely. Then watch them do just that –
erase each other. The plot in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is played
out via Clementine’s erasure from Joel’s memory. We get to relive the entire
relationship with him—the sting from when they fuck up and do something to hurt
you, the little disappointments from unresolved tiffs, miscommunications,
failed expectations, and the inevitable suffering of falling out of love or
someone you love falling out of love with you, but also the excitement of meeting
someone who seemed so other-worldly, the thrill of new experiences, the comfort
of companionship with someone who has “picked” you to share their life with,
the indescribable feeling of being truly connected to another human being in
this world—through Joel & Clem’s relationship, we’re experiencing all
relationships. What we come to realize is that if we were to erase a person who
we once loved, we would be erasing not only the bad, but the good as well. One
can never learn from their mistakes if they don’t remember them. We find
ourselves screaming right along with Joel, “Can you hear me? I don’t want this
anymore! I want to call it off!” But no one can hear him. He made a
choice. He chose to forget. This movie makes you sad because it inevitably
causes you to go into reflection mode and ruminate about your previous
relationships, reliving both the moments that made you want to kill yourself or
your significant other AND the moments that made life itself worth living.
Happiness (1998)
Happiness is about a group of interconnected
people on a quest to achieve happiness from the sick or dark places within
them. It’s not sad in the way that starving children or puppies with tumors are
sad. The sadness lies in the film’s ruthless honesty about a variety of very
taboo and very real topics that most directors wouldn’t dare touch. It’s a
movie that explores the darkness that lives in every human being and how our
core desires and fears are often directly related. You don’t watch Happiness
because it’s enjoyable to watch because, in my opinion, it’s not. It will shock
you, make you sad, and make you incredibly uncomfortable, but it’s worth it
because after the credits roll, you feel as if you’ve seen something you
weren’t supposed to see, something that the world was hiding from you, but
something that is true.
The Hours (2002)
Any woman who has experienced major depression
gets this movie. They may not like it, but they get it. The story follows three
women's lives during a single day, all connected by the Virginia Woolf novel,
Mrs. Dalloway, and all separated by time. Each woman, in their own way, is
trapped by having to keep their feelings hidden for the sake of others. Consequently,
they conceal their true identities and project artificial ones constructed from society’s
expectations of their feminine roles: wife, mother, caregiver, hostess. This
movie’s particular brand of sadness arises from the realization that when you live your
life solely for others and not for yourself, it’s not a life really lived. For
example, Laura dedicates an entire day to plan a party for her husband, whose
happiness, she realizes, is solely based on her just being there, being his
wife, being the mother of his children, not based on who she really is or what
she can do. This movie provokes the viewer to question their own roles in
others’ lives, what they’re really living for, and how they’re missing out on
what meaningful things they could produce or who they could be.
Precious (2009)
The fact that this shit happens to many girls in real life is enough to put Precious on this list. This movie is not
depressing because of its implications like a lot of the others on this list,
but rather because the story itself is heartbreaking.
If you have any doubts about the crippling sadness
this movie induces, please refer to the following scene.
I can’t get this scene out of my head, to this
day. Why? I’ve seen way more tearjerkers
than I care to admit, so why do I come back to this one? I think what makes
this film so poignant, so hard to watch, and so unforgettable, is that it accurately
portrays the humanity in the broken, fucked up people involved in perpetuating
a cycle of abuse, and that’s something we don’t like to see. Regarding people
that do evil things as purely evil people is something that provides us with
some sort of comfort but it fails to recognize that they are PEOPLE, just like
us. We don’t want to think of people like Precious’ parents as people like us
because that makes us wonder what terrible things we are capable of doing after
experiencing enough pain.
Breaking the Waves (1996)
Are you
there god? It’s me, Lars von Trier! Um, God… why are you crying?
I probably could’ve put every Lars von Trier movie
on this list because they’re all emotionally disturbing, but this one is less
in-your-face about it. Its passive quality (along with von Trier’s stricter
adherence to Dogme95) somehow makes Breaking the Waves even more heart
wrenching. It’s like we’re watching a home video of someone’s life completely falling
apart. The story is about a mentally ill woman, Bess, who falls deeply in love
and gets married, despite the reservations of her tight-assed church. She frequently
escapes into conversations with god, using her own voice to play both roles. Her
new husband becomes seriously injured and Bess is devastated. Bedridden, he manipulates
her into having sex with other men so that he can hear about it, convinced that
it’s god’s will. Bess begins to truly believe that the more she sleeps with
other men, the better her husband becomes, until her actions cause hellish outcomes
and end in horrible tragedy.
Naturally, amirite? There should be a support group for the
emotional victims of Lars von Trier’s movies.
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These are in no particular order. I could
have listed more but by the end of writing about ten of ‘em I was already
teary-eyed from watching all these trailers.
Movies I could've included but didn't: Leaving Las Vegas, Magnolia, any other Lars Von Trier's film (esp. Dogville, Manderlay, Melancholia), Adaptation, A Woman Under the Influence, Tarnation, Boogie Nights, Persona, Blue, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, La Strada, American History X, Boys Don't Cry, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Life is Beautiful, and... you know, Beaches.
Tell me, fellow sad-sacks, what
movies broke YOUR fucking heart?
