The tear-jerker ‘Spoiler Alert’ is well aware of its place in a long line of movies that make you cry

As long as there have been movies, people have been going to the movies to cry.

From “An Affair to Remember” to “The Notebook,” “Casablanca” to “Forrest Gump,” bawling has been a near religion.

Pick your poison: “Dead Poets Society,” “Beaches,” “Bambi,” “Steel Magnolias,” “Terms of Endearment,” “Philadelphia,” “Stepmom,” “The Way We Were.” Sitting in the afterglow of beautiful people suffering beautifully … as time runs out … self-sacrifices are made and understandings reached … all that has been the stuff of pashmina-soft catharsis. “Self-care,” in a sense, before self-care was a thing, and an “ugly cry” long before Oprah invented that term.

And it is certainly not culturally specific. Growing up personally on a steady diet of Bollywood — a world of movies in which almost every one qualified as a weeper — I began my own crying journey early. And often. If wallowing was a sport, I was Michael Jordan.

All of which came hurtling back when I attended a special advance screening earlier this week of the effective new film “Spoiler Alert,” hosted by the Inside Out Film Festival (following a holiday party they were hosting here in Toronto at the Ace Hotel). Tis the season for a tear-jerker? Pretty much.

Courtesy of Michael Showalter, who directed “The Big Sick” (in many ways this is a companion movie), and starring Jim Parsons and Ben Aldridge as a couple whose lives are tested when the latter gets a cancer diagnosis (this is foreshadowed in the first couple of minutes of the film), the movie is one whose publicists are clearly on it: nestled in the cubbyhole on every seat in the theatre at the TIFF Bell Lightbox was — voila! — a package of branded tissue.

“You might need this,” read the package, which this crowd — mainly made up of well-moisturized gay men with expert outerwear — oohed and ahhed over, some of them inevitably reaching for their camera phones to post the Kleenex on their feeds.

Ready, set … sob.

Based on Michael Ausiello’s memoir “Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies,” the movie pretty much pulls off what it sets out to do. Never gets too maudlin, is spare when it needs to be (there is one particularly moving near-silent scene where the two men sit in a cafe photographing each other, essentially memorizing each other’s faces) and is anchored by two sensitive lead performances (plus the fabulous bonus of Sally Field, playing the mother of the dying lad). But what struck me more than anything else: the extent to which the film itself is cognizant of weepers that came before it — and that the characters in it are, too.

A writer in Mashable summed up this meta strain when he wrote that the screenwriters of the film “haven’t gone quite so far as to craft the self-referential equivalent of what ‘Scream’ did for slasher movies, but ‘Spoiler Alert’ is acutely aware of other tear-jerkers, both in form and content.” For instance: a very particular “Terms of Endearment”/Shirley MacLaine callback in the movie itself (it was featured prominently in the trailer, pretty much leading potential viewers to the well of that comparison). Likewise: the wink-wink casting of “Steel Magnolias’” Field (her more quietly bereft mother here is a spiritual cousin of the bereft mother she played in “Magnolias,” in which the most famous scene has Field breaking down beautifully in a cemetery).

For students of romantic film — and the 1970s era, in particular — it was also hard not to think back to the classic “Love Story,” with Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal. I certainly did!

The ultimate movie about gorgeous people in the primes of their lives falling in love, and sifting through autumn leaves and frolicking in the snow, only to find out that Time Is Very Much Limited, it was a phenomenon when it came out. Like full-blown and kind of hard to explain to younger generations. The biggest box office topper of 1970 (yes, there was a time in which a romance movie could do that), it yielded seven Oscar nominations (including Best Picture), and went on to usher in one of the most famous (also oft-ridiculed) movie lines of all time, when MacGraw’s Jenny says, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” A touchstone movie for the boomer gen and the weeper of all weepers, quite possibly.

The allusions to it in “Spoiler Alert”? Fairly overt (though this is less of a melodrama), but most notably in the circular nature of their respective storytelling. The movie “Love Story,” like the bestselling novel by Erich Segal, famously began with the line “What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who dies?”

Much as in “Spoiler Alert,” the spoiler alert is that there is no spoiler alert.

Shinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist covering culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani

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