The Most Emotional Scene in Cinema

Calling something the most emotional anything is a broad statement. Anything can be emotional to anyone and also be nothing but a passing thought to another. Movies truly find a way to pull at our heart strings but it's no secret there are some scenes that just strike certain cords and make us feel broken down, sad, or just simply in awe. When I think of the most emotional scene in cinema, a few things come to mind.

First, there's the death of John Coffey in The Green Mile. This scene never fails to make me sad, and it's not just because he was an innocent man sentenced to death for something he never did, but because he and the prison guards willingly accepted his fate, because they knew it was something that society had demanded. The adaption from Stephen King's book of the same name was masterful and the late Michael Clark Duncan was brilliant in his performance. The Jesus Christ-like character of John Coffey is a reminder that it's important to be kind to one another in a world of ugliness, because life is never fair. John Coffey sums it up when he says, "I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can't.”

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Another scene I think about as being the most emotional is the death of Guido from Roberto Benigni's 1997 masterpiece, Life Is Beautiful. This scene, for me, comes a close second because it's the accumulation of a whole movie's worth of emotional scenes. The premise of the movie is that Guido and his son are taken to a concentration camp after being taken by the Nazis. As traumatizing as the holocaust was on world history, this movie did something remarkable in showing the best father/son dynamic I've ever seen put to film. Guido convinces his son that their time at the concentration camp is nothing but a game, and if they play by the rules, they'll win. From hiding from guards, sneaking his son into a group of German children, and mocking guards to their faces to get a laugh from his son, Guido spends his whole time at the camp trying to shield his son from the horrors that were occurring behind the scenes. In the end, Guido died doing what had always been doing, keeping a smile on his son's face, and that is something that even the coldest of hearts could not deny was heartbreaking.

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However, the most emotional scene ever put to film, in my opinion, is the ceasefire from Alfonso Cuarón's highly underrated 2006 film, Children of Men. Where to even begin with this masterfully-created scene? First, some background: the year is 2027 and it's been over 18 years since a child has been born into this world. Women, for unknown reasons, have become infertile, which has plunged the world into madness and desperation as it seems as though mankind has been given an expiration date. Clive Owen plays a former activist who is tasked with getting Kee, who is revealed to be the only pregnant woman in existence, to the West Coast of the UK.

This scene picks up right after Kee gives birth to a healthy baby girl in the middle of a shootout between rebels and bureaucrats. As Cuarón's signature tracking shot follows the pair and the newborn baby through the ravaged building, we are given a glimpse into one of human's most primal instincts; we are hardwired to respond to a baby's cries.

All of a sudden, in the middle of shootout filled with death and destruction, a single baby's cries level the surrounding area into absolute silence. We witness people, who for 18 years believed they'd never see a child again, collapse into utter shock and awe. We see people glare in absolute disbelief, as we could assume that some of them had never seen a baby in their lifetime. We see the soldiers, who are probably filled with adrenaline and ready to kill, fall to their knees as a baby passes them. A single beacon of hope as a literal war stops in the face of innocence.

Now, I have to get philosophical and touch on the masterful orchestra piece from John Tavener called Eternity's Sunrise. Aside from how beautiful the piece sounds, it is actually based on William Blake's poem, Eternity. The poem goes like this:

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.

William Blake is implying that too often do we possess beauty as a material thing, when in reality, all material things will eventually disappear from this Earth. Once we start seeing things like beauty and joy as immaterial aspects of life, it becomes eternal and lives on. He asks us to "live in Eternity's Sunrise" which I believe is like asking us to metaphorically live with the belief that life's joys have no beginning or end. In a world torn apart by people's desperation, a single baby brings about sense of optimism that better things are to come and that maybe beauty is not in material things, but in the idea of a better world united the most joyous thing in life, the birth of a child.

All in all, this scene consistently ranks as my favorite of all-time, because it represents a universal truth that we are all part of the same species. We are all on the same team, and in this never-ending barrage of horrors that mankind inflict on one another, the single most uniting feeling is innocence in the shape of a baby; an opportunity to start over.