Tina Kakadelis
For as much as I love movies, the life of an actor is one that I could not fathom pursuing. If you were to ignore my inherent inability to perform like that, the biggest hurdle of becoming an actor for me is an ability to be scrutinized every second of every day. It’s self-tape after self-tape, people talking about you and the weird faces you make while you cry. Writer, producer, director, and star Emily Robinson tackles a particular facial quirk in the SXSW-premiering Ugly Cry and how one small, flippant observation can send someone into a downward spiral.
“I feel like nowadays you’re either crying, getting sex trafficked, or committing suicide. It’s like a weird gender thing,” Miles (Aaron Dominguez) tells his girlfriend Delaney (Robinson) as he packs to leave for a zombie movie shoot. They are both actors, but Miles is having a fair bit more success than Delaney who is booking more babysitting gigs than anything else. When she receives a callback for a horror movie that requires her to scream, cry, and be highly emotional, Delaney feels like things are starting to turn in the right direction. This brief spurt of self-confidence is quickly derailed by a throwaway comment from her agent. The producer said Delaney has an ugly crying face, but other than that, they loved her. It’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back and causes Delaney to make increasingly more erratic decisions to get her career going.
Ugly Cry joins a long list of films about what it takes to be an actor and the weight of the immense beauty standards placed on the shoulders of women. However, this film is not a retread of what came before. Ugly Cry has more force behind it because of Robinson’s life. She grew up as a child actor and in her director’s statement says, “I learned to objectify myself before I learned to read.” It’s the sort of statement that takes the wind out of your lungs when you read it and you think not just of what Robinson endured, but the child stars that came before. How on earth have we allowed an industry and a society to thrive that values a person’s body more than their ability to read? It’s an outage that’s unfortunately hundreds of years too late, but one that’s the fire underneath Robinson’s fearless script. It’s also worth noting that Ryan Simpkins, who plays Robinson’s rival/friend in the film, also grew up in the industry. One of their first roles was the daughter of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road.
While it doesn’t veer far enough into the surreal to warrant a complete David Lynch comparison, Robinson is not afraid to play around with the boundaries of reality. Throughout the film we hear someone crying off screen, but it’s only the audience and Delaney who can hear it. We learn those tears belong to young Delaney, the little girl who dreamed of being an actor. The little girl who Delaney likely thinks of every single time she prints out new sides for a self-tape that ends up resulting in a text message from her agent that says, “they LOVED you, but ultimately went in another direction.”
Ugly Cry turns from a typical LA, working actor movie to something one might consider a light body horror, but what Robinson calls “the horror of having a body.” Once Delaney hears that she has an ugly crying face, it’s all she can think about. She’s not yet twenty-five, but bangs down the door of a Botox clinic in the Valley. She tells herself it’s preventative, but deep down feels that she needs this as soon as possible because all producers see her as is someone who can act, but looks so ugly when they cry. To be an actor is to live within the confines of an immeasurable number of contradictions. You have to be pretty, but not so pretty that it could alienate the viewer. Also be able to cry at the drop of a hat while maintaining an effervescent look. Ugly Cry is a film that’s pissed off and rightfully so.
Jessie Buckley has been collecting awards this season for her performance in Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet. In her BAFTA speech, she dedicated the award in part to her daughter. She promises that she will “continue to be disobedient so that [her daughter] can belong to a world in all [her] mad, complex, wildness as a young woman.” That speech feels like such a natural connective tissue to Delaney in Ugly Cry. Perhaps if the world and Hollywood was filled with more people like Buckley, it wouldn’t have come to this for Delaney. Ugly Cry is anything but ugly, a self-assured directorial debut that captures a justified rage about the impassable road to perfection.
