Chapter 7
The Emotional Crack
One of the simplest openings to create is emotional. If someone is grieving, our natural empathy is readily engaged.
Emma Thompson won the Oscar for her screenplay adaptation of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and she did a beautiful job. One of Emma’s challenges was that in the book the two main characters, Elinor Dashwood (played by Thompson herself) and Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant), don’t see each other or communicate with each other for the whole middle of the novel. They may have readily accepted in the early 1800s that a woman could love a man and pine for him for years when they had only spent a handful of hours together. Today it takes a bit more convincing. And so Thompson (the writer) gets to work putting these two charming characters through the falling in love process.
They meet at a time when Elinor and her sisters have recently lost their father. His brother (and appalling sister-in-law) have therefore come into possession of the family home, and the Dashwood sisters and their mother are forced to move out of the palatial estate and find a rental house elsewhere. Somewhere inexpensive, as they must all live on a pension of £500 a year.
After a cute meet type subplot of helping the youngest sister, Margaret, come out of her hiding place under a library table, Edward engages the 12 year old, teaching her to fence with wooden swords. When an attractive man is kind to a child who has just lost her father, it is endearing. And when said child stabs him with the wooden sword when he has turned to wave to her older sister, it is another crack, and even though they have only known each other for three or four minutes (screen time) you can easily see that Elinor is falling for Edward.
Next thing you know, Edward follows the sound of music through the enormous house and finds Elinor listening to her sister Marianne (Kate Winslet) playing the piano, “my father’s favorite.” Elinor is weeping and of course has no handkerchief, so Edward generously lends her one, along with his heart as he falls right into that gaping crack in the starched stiffness of Georgian manners. They are already so well matched in sympathy and humor and intelligence, that they are finishing each other’s sentences. There is not a jot of doubt even in our jaded twenty-first-century minds, that these two are perfect for each other, that they have fallen in love before our eyes, and we root wholeheartedly for them to live happily ever after together.
In the climactic scene when Edward reappears and tells Elinor that he is not married, his brother is the Mr. Ferrars who has married and not himself, she bursts into tears and it is funny and touching and human. When you have heard and believed the worst news you could possibly get and then find out it isn’t true at all, the relief and joy can certainly bring a flood of tears. But in order for this payoff to work for the audience, emotionally, they must believe in this love between these two people. Not imagine that over time their feelings have deepened. Not assume that they fell in love off-screen, between scenes. No. Elinor and Edward (and all movie loves) have to fall in love onscreen, in scenes, with the audience present. And they did. We were with them. Otherwise we don’t really believe. And it’s your job as a screenwriter to make us believe the story you are showing us.
In High Fidelity (2000, screenplay by D.V. DeVincentis and Steve Pink, and John Cusack and Scott Rosenberg adapting Nick Hornby’s novel), when Laura’s (Iben Hjejle) father dies, her first call is to Rob (John Cusack), not her current boyfriend. In her grief she reaches out immediately to someone who knew her dad and knows exactly what this loss means to her. Rob goes to the funeral with her and by the time it’s over, they are practically back together. This shared grief is so keenly felt, such a crack in each of them that it transcends all the reasons not to be together. The obstacles fall away as these two are faced, vulnerable and emotionally naked, with the love that has always been there between them. Now undeniably.
Grief is not the only emotion that creates an opening through which one person falls in love with another.
Fear can create a crack in the shell. When Kevin Kline’s Luc Tessier first meets Meg Ryan’s Kate on a flight from Toronto to Paris, in French Kiss (1989, screenplay by Adam Brooks), she is monumentally terrified of flying. And yet, somehow abject terror looks good on her. She is also bigoted against him and pretty much all French people, as one of them has recently stolen her fiancé. Kate is needy, shut down, cranky, and rude. Luc is oversized, loud, unshaven, pushy, obnoxious, and French. He picks an argument with her that gets her mind off her fear long enough for them to get airborne and voilà. He is hooked. And he also turns out to be the Life Force character to Kate’s Sleepwalker on her misguided mission to try to get her wimpy ex-fiancé back. (See Chapter 17.) She may hate Luc, but we love him for her. We are completely rooting for him to get this girl and kiss the starch out of her.
Rage can work, too. In Look Who’s Talking (1989, written and directed by Amy Heckerling), John Travolta’s James is a cab driver in New York City who happens to pick up Kirstie Alley’s Mollie in labor about to give birth to her first child. He’s so frantic to get her to the hospital in time that he drives like a maniac, and she is screaming in rage at him the whole way. By the time they arrive at the hospital, he abandons his cab and ends up in the delivery room in mask and scrubs (unrecognized by her, assumed to be the father by everyone else). He stays beside her as her rage turns to pain and struggle and then to joy as the baby Mikey is placed in her arms. By this point James is totally gone on both of them. There could not possibly be a more vulnerable time in a woman’s life than during childbirth.
And great joy is as heart-opening as anything else.