Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

The question now becomes, can you have a movie that is basically about four characters wherein those four actors give above-average performances, and still end up with nothing? I mean nothing. ‘The Man Who Cried’ is the latest installment by the critically overrated, uber-average Sally Potter. The writer/director of ‘Orlando’ and ‘The Tango Lesson’, Potter has become the movie world’s lesser-known Emperor, and whatever it is she does, she somehow does it such a way that no one dares to say she’s got no clothes.

Imagine if you will, a well-acted movie, and by some of your better actors/actresses no less (Christina Ricci, I will admit, is rather up in the air generally speaking, but she is surprisingly good here, and it is rather a difficult role), about a girl from Russia who grew up without her father, makes her way to France where she works the non-glamorous side of an operatic production, falls in love with a gypsy (hence much criticism, being that gypsies are frowned upon in general), finally has Hitler invade in the middle of the whole mess (and she’s Jewish), has to run to America, actually manages to reunite with her father who thought she was dead........ and you couldn’t care less.

How, I ask you, could it happen?


One story (the one that tries to salvage the Potter name) has it that when Potter was finished with this movie it was close to 300 minutes long, but when the movie found its way to screens it had been chopped down to 97 minutes. Assuming that the movie worked in its 300 minute form, it isn’t a bad theory that it was obviously ruined. Cut out two-thirds of anything, and you’re going to be hard-pressed to have something good when you’re finished.

That is a theory I have a lot of sympathy with, generally speaking. I can’t make myself buy it here. This movie is as long as you can stand at 97 minutes, and I can’t really envision what happens in the other 200 minutes that turns it into a good movie.


‘The Man Who Cried’ starts off with, as I said, Suzie’s father painfully deciding to go to America in search of enough money to send for his family. He isn’t gone long (moviewise) before little Suzie (Christina Ricci...though not yet) is ousted from her home and sent wandering toward... who knows what really, a place to live. She knows her father is in America, so she keeps repeating that word. It’s very touching.

She ends up in England where she is taken in by some sort of Adopt-A-Refugee program, and is placed with a couple who are apparently unable to have children due to some plan of God whereby people without feelings and emotions are not allowed to pass this on. When we flash forward to the Suzie that is now actually played Ricci, and these adoptive parents are returning a picture of her father to her, the trio all look as though they just met, and moreover look as though they are all of the opinion that if you put forward any expression at all your face will break. It’s all rather touching. ???


We soon find Ricci on the road to France, because apparently it is a step closer to America. Once in France, she meets Lola (Cate Blanchett). I’m not saying Lola is a bad character, and I’m not saying that Blanchett does a bad job (because she actually doesn’t). I’m just saying that Lola is Natasha. That's all I'm saying.

Lola, oh-so appropriately named because she is rather of the Lola persuasion, if you get my drift, moves in with Suzie, and the two of them go to work for an operatic production. The star of the show is Dante Dominio (wonderfully played by John Turturro), and a more pathetically cliche, pompous, prima donna, opera singer you are not likely to find (except in real life, of course). Being that he is the fabulously wealthy star, Lola naturally gravitates (and other words) towards him.

Suzie, on the other hand, has her eye on the head gypsy of the production (they handle the horses...yes, the horses) Cesar (Johnny Depp). Dominio, who wants everything he can lay his hands on, and everything else besides, is outraged that Suzie would be interested in the useless gypsy when he is right there waiting to be adored. Don’t worry about the fact that he already has a ‘relationship’ with Lola, after all, he doesn’t.

And then, there is much clashing of classes, and fear of Nazis, and going back to America to find your father. It’s all rather touching.


The movie seems mainly (as do her two other ‘masterpieces’) to work on the theory that some of the greatest movies of all-time are considered boring by a great many people. Thus, if you want to make a great movie, make it as boring as possible. It is actually, merely countless instances of one of the worst things you can do when making a film all strung together, and that is to do things just for the sake of doing them. It’s like having a movie with lots of really expensive special effects just for the sake of having them, only this is the really boring version.

It’s having the sad, little girl do sad, little things just for the sake of doing sad, little things. Kicking the dog just because you will feel sad when I kick the dog, not because it has anything to do with the story. It is about opera and gypsies, just because I had a bee in my bonnet to have opera and gypsies.

It manages, somehow, to make itself into the movie equivalent of a long-distance call to your parents. It talks and talks and talks, and at the end of the call when someone asks you what it said, you say, ‘nothing’.

It’s probably best described in terms of the opera it so loves. It is quite similar to seeing an opera you don’t know, in a language you don’t understand. You have a vague awareness that something ‘pretty’ is going on up there, and there is music, but you haven’t got a clue what’s going on, and you certainly couldn’t care about it. You would try of course. Well, this big guy over here seems very unhappy with that lady who is singing over there. The other girl was caught kissing the one guy, and at that point everybody started wailing like a pack of banshees. That was apparently bad for some reason. And you get the same sort of satisfaction from ‘The Man Who Cried’ except that you don’t even have the excuse of not knowing the language or the storyline.


If you thought ‘Reds’ was about six hours too short, ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ was diabolically clever in the way it got you to ‘feel’, ‘The Others’ had too much plot, and ‘Moulin Rouge’ needed more window dressing, then this just might be the movie for you. Otherwise, avoid it at all costs.

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD