The Man Who Cried (2000) - Potter's forlorn war drama is a clonker for the ages

[ZERO]

Big stars in shadowy sepia tones appear on this poster for Sally Potter's The Man Who Cried

A Jewish girl from Russia moves to the US in the late 1920s but winds up in England and later in Paris in the increasingly wrought now Nazi-era Europe.

The Man Who Cried is written and directed by Sally Potter (The Gold Diggers (1983)). It is a thoroughly awful film.

Christina Ricci (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)) stares blankly and sings (the actual singing not done by her though), looking far from a real singer. Cate Blanchett (Bangers (1999, short)) is dreadful as a Russian glamour girl; John Turturro (The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)) is hideously terrible as an opera-singing fascist; and Johnny Depp (Cannes Man (1997)) is simply ridiculous here as a talking 'porn-stache' gypsy. - All of them don bad accents to boot.

Everything is inauthentic, and every second of the film strikes one as forlorn. Potter's fantasy of war-time Europe, wherein the realities and the sufferings are only a backdrop, is wholly inadmissible.

Everything is grandly produced, which only makes the quizzically titled film worse; that large sums of investment have obviously been injected into it. - Who is the man who cried and what's the point? -  All is bad in The Man Who Cried, and it is a miracle that all its stars - and Potter most of all - worked after this mire of a picture.

Watch a trailer for the film here

 

Cost: Unknown

Box office: 1.7 mil. $

= Uncertain - but likely a box office disaster

[The Man Who Cried premiered 2 September (Venice Film Festival) and runs 100 minutes. Shooting took place from September - November 1999 in England and France, including in Paris. The film opened #20 to a 93k $ first weekend in 11 theaters in North America, its highest ranking there, where it grossed 747k $ (43.9 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were Spain with 232k $ (13.6 % - at a 2003 re-release) and Germany with 154k $ (9.1 %). The 1.7 mil. $ final gross stems from The-Numbers.com without details backing it up. If the film was made on a likely 7 mil. $ budget, which could very well be a low projection, it would therefore rank as a box office disaster, returning 0.24 times its cost. The film won a National Board of Review award. Roger Ebert gave it a 3/4 star review, translating to four notches over this one. Potter returned with Yes (2004). Depp returned in Before Night Falls (2000); Ricci in All Over the Guy (2001). The Man Who Cried is rotten at 35 % with a 4.70/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

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