“One must have a heart of stone not to read about the death of little Nell without laughing” was Oscar Wilde’s notorious response to the emotional onslaught of Charles Dickens’s 1841 novel, The Old Curiosity Shop. Having watched two films in two weeks about the death of a child, it offers a clue as to why I cried in only one.
In her journals, the novelist Helen Garner writes: “Sentimentality keeps looking over its shoulder to see how you’re taking it. Emotion doesn’t give a shit whether anyone’s looking or not.” Is the presence of sentiment the reason I was dry-eyed at the end of one film and in pieces at the end of the other?
Chloe Zhao’s acclaimed adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet promises tears aplenty, given its focus on how the death of Shakespeare’s son influenced the writing of Hamlet. Child mortality is inescapably tragic, and yet too often I found myself wincing at Max Richter’s insistent score or scoffing at scenes of groundlings at the Globe blubbing. I left without shedding a tear, only to find the cinema full of weeping couples comforting each other.
