My Favorite Tearjerkers

In honor of THE NOTEBOOK at 20

This week marks the 20th anniversary of The Notebook, a movie that is most notable for me because it prompted the single greatest awards show moment of all-time. Move over The Slap, so long Adele Dazeem … there is simply NOTHING that can compare with the 2005 MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss winners Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams (by then an off-screen couple) recreating the movie’s iconic lip lock.

But while that’s why I remember The Notebook (OK, and a friend is starring in the currently running Broadway production), of course, I acknowledge that is not why most people return to the film. It’s a tearjerker! It makes people cry in a way that feels cathartic and beautiful.

There are plenty of movies that make us cry that we ultimately never want to revisit — ones involving tragedies like Blue Valentine, Room, Dancer in the Dark, Schindler’s List — that don’t have us clamoring up to retraumatize ourselves. I’m reminded of a quote by C.S. Lewis in A Grief Observed when thinking about why we line up to watch movies like The Notebook again and again: “[separation and loss] is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure.”

We may be sobbing, but we’re still dancing all the same. And for many of us, that beats sleepwalking through life. We’re lighter on our feet when we’re dancing, even if that’s through heavy material.

The Notebook, 2004. © New Line Cinema

I think I came to The Notebook a little too late for it to become a go-to tearjerker. By the time I got around to it, I knew the twist and a good chunk of the beats — in large part because I had two longtime family friends who insisted they would force me to watch this “chick flick” (and then I finally watched it years later on my own). If you want to revisit it for yourself, The Notebook is on Amazon Prime Video for the next 8 days. It’s still much better than any other Nicholas Sparks adaptation ever made, that’s for sure.

But as the high priestess of the multiplex says, “We come to this place … to cry, because we need that, all of us.” Sometimes we need some tears to remind us that we’re still capable of feeling. We turn to our favorite tearjerker not because we seek to inflict pain on ourselves but to remind ourselves that pain does not hold dominion over us. I stand with Heather Havrilesky’s opinion piece in The New York Times last month (gift article): bring back the tearjerker!

I find asking people about the movies that make them cry a deeply intimate and vulnerable question. The things that move us to tears remind us of the things we value and, ultimately, what we belong to. Naturally, I will compromise the beauty of this sentiment by offering up this look at my own soul … for the price of a Marshall and the Movies subscription.

Behind the paywall are 10 groupings of movies that unleash the floodgates behind my corneas and a little bit of why they move me so — trying my best to avoid spoilers where I can.

(If you’re wondering, yes, I did cry several times writing this.)