Tears for fears

Anyway, the moment I shed a tear in Ricki and the Flash happened to
be a line from Rick Springfield’s character (Greg) when he was putting
the word on Meryl Streep’s character, (Ricki aka Linda) which, coincidentally
is one of the lines featured in the trailer
(that I fortunately didn’t see beforehand) so it must be one of the better
ones. ‘It doesn’t matter if your kids love you or not. It’s
not their job to love you. It’s your job to love them.’ That‘s
revealing I suppose because I doubt that it would strike a chord with a younger
kid-free audient but it got my eyes leaking that’s for sure.
OK, so the Hollywood writers picked their target and I was hit by a sucker punch.
Let’s take a look at the lesser known but ‘worthy’ movie that
also got me a little teary, Still Life, directed and written by Uberto
Passolini. I’d recorded it some time ago but we’d been hesitant
about watching it because the synopsis suggested that it might be a little downbeat.
i.e. ‘A council case worker looks for the relatives of those
found dead and alone.’ Inevitably there came a night when there was no
alluring alternative so we began watching it.
There was an immediate sense of it being a ‘British’ film in the
Ealing tradition, if I’ve remembered my studio traditions correctly. Our
first surprise was that the actor playing the lead role was none other than
Eddie Marsan, who plays Gilbert Norrell in the brilliant made-for-TV series
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.* Although Still Life isn’t
a comedy, it’s exactly the sort of role that Alec Guinness might’ve
tackled in his and Ealing’s heyday.
Where was I? Oh yes. Well, at the end of the movie, Eddie Marsan’s character,
John May, dies in ironic circumstances. On the same day as his last ‘client’
is buried with a large group of friends and relatives in attendance, all there
at John May’s behest, John May’s own funeral has nobody but the
grave diggers to mourn him. Until.. well, you’ll have to have a look at
it yourself. Let me know if you have a quiet cry too.

Then, with apologies to bro’ Dick, there’s the rugby. When the Japanese
team ran over the top of the Springboks in the last few moments of their World
Cup first round pool game, I wept – Maria took the pic heading this column
by way of evidence. Of course, it was a bonus that it was the Springboks on
the losing end, but had it been any of the top six or so rugby nations I would’ve
felt the same. There is something heroic about the Japanese, who, despite being
supplemented with a sprinkling of Pacific Island players, are universally regarded
as physically under-equipped to play the game in the first place, but in their
stereotypically Japanese way they worked around their deficiencies with well-considered
strategies (under the supervision of former Wallaby coach, Eddie Jones) and
attacked and defended with fiendish low-centre-of-gravity application. And despite
the drama and histrionics of the recent NRL final, (which I listened to on the
radio the way home from the Westernport Hotel the other night), there was something
profoundly moving about the way the Japan / South Africa game played out that
could only happen in rugby union.
And so I wept. Mind you, from what I could see on the replay every Japanese
rugby follower at the game was weeping too, plus a few South African supporters,
of course.
Perhaps that’s understandable. Australians understand a bloke blubbering
at a game of footy because we place the playing and the watching of sport very
high on our list of cultural values, even if it that sport happens to be rugby.
And now the Japanese are through to the quarter finals of the World Cup, after
having reduced the proud Samoans to an incoherent rabble. If they win their
next game I predict a veritable tsunami of tears from rugged rugby / thugby
followers around the world.

* I’m reading the delightful book from which the series
was drawn right now.