The Attack of the Left-Wing Weepie

By RICHARD CORLISS

This must have happened to you. You and a companion have just seen a dramatic movie. One of you is still choking back sobs. The other has eyes as dry as the Gobi. The unmoved one says, "I can't believe you were so gullible as to fall for that pap." The teary one blurts out, "If that film didn't touch your heart, maybe you don't have one." Relationships have sundered on this primal wrangle: whether or not one surrenders to the thrall of a movie weepie.

It's not just a guy-gal thing, though that's part of the equation. It's more about the satisfactions you seek in entertainment. A belly laugh? A virtual blast? A story whose noble sentiment makes you feel all warm inside but makes your friend's eyes roll? I call this kind of movie the liberal weepie.

The genre may be specifically political or more broadly humanist, but its codes and attitudes are as rigid as those for an old-time western or musical. The plot typically begins with a decent person suffering some outrage by an oppressive overlord, whether military, governmental or corporate. It goes on to chronicle the steps by which our hero either exacts righteous revenge or, if it's a tragedy, is crushed by the system. The goal of the movie is to provoke some fellow feeling for the world's underdogs. Then, cleansed and spiritually enriched, you can return to American Idol.

In Hollywood the liberal weepie hibernates for most of the year, only to emerge in time for Academy Award consideration. Frequently, the top Oscar has gone to films of social or political sentiment, from The Life of Emile Zola and Mrs. Miniver to Dances with Wolves and Braveheart. In 2005 the Christian right's attacks on the mercy-killing plot of Million Dollar Baby may have been the spur for the Oscars that went to the film and its star, Hilary Swank.

The recent Oscar-winning weepies are descendants of the domestic melodramas of the '30s and '40s, with Barbara Stanwyck or Greta Garbo cast as a strong-willed woman censured by a straitlaced society. In the past 20 years, when women have achieved a measure of equality (except at the box office), the hero-victim has tended to be male, and the affliction has been mental, as in Rain Man, Forrest Gump and A Beautiful Mind. They're the movie equivalent of the orphan puppy that no one will adopt--except you, dear sensitive viewer.

The purest form of the social weepie is usually a European art film. And Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley--which won the top prize at Cannes last year, has played at film festivals on four continents and is now in U.S. theaters--is an ideal Exhibit A.

The film is set in Ireland in 1920, when the locals fight for their independence from Britain, then split into rival factions. Two brothers personify the division: Teddy (Padraic Delaney), who's open to political compromise, and Damien (Cillian Murphy), who won't renounce the purity of his socialist ideals and joins the revolutionary arm of the i.r.a. Loach's approach, though, is anything but evenhanded. The British soldiers are cartoonishly brutal, insulting old ladies, bayoneting men, pulling out a suspect's fingernails with rusty pliers. It's easy to see which of the brothers is to have your sympathy. Murphy, with his sensitive, sensuous features, completely outglams Delaney. And he's the leftmost character in the movie.

Critics tend to be as susceptible to elevated sentiment as real people are. They love a movie that makes them cry, especially for what their politics tells them are noble reasons. Well, I'm a critic, predictably progressive and a pushover for movie sentiment. (An Affair to Remember, wipe me out one more time.) Audiences may laugh at an Adam Sandler movie, but that doesn't make it good. The same applies to a film that cozies up to an audience's political beliefs. You're welcome to cry, but don't feel good about it in the morning.

The challenge for the makers of political weepies is to bring as much art, intelligence and passion to them as to any other film. Your challenge as a viewer is to make up your own mind and heart. And if you remain unmoved by all the Irish mist in a Ken Loach film, don't think you've hardened into a Darth Vader. Saying no to a weepie, of any wing, is nothing to cry about.