My (2nd) Favorite Scene In The Rain

This post is for the second All-Wet Blog-A-Thon hosted by Andrew at Encore Entertainment. Make sure you check it out!

My (2nd) Favorite Movie Scene In The Rain doesn’t actually take the place in the rain. This may sound like a cheat but, I assure you, it isn’t. I’ll explain.

It is the memorial service for the dad of Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom). Once the speeches have been given, toasts made, tap dance routines performed, the reunited band fronted by Drew’s cousin Jesse (Paul Schneider) takes the stage. Drew, perhaps needing a little alone time, retreats from the room where he encounters his requisite Manic Pixie Dream Girl Claire Colburn (Kirsten Dunst). She has, as she has promised, brought him substantial instructions for a road trip on which he is about to embark. Thus, the time has come for the Protagonist and The Manic Pixie Dream Girl to part. And like any director/writer worth his DGA ID card, Cameron Crowe craves their goodbye to occur in the rain.

Now, at this point he simply could have moved them outside for no good reason and cued up a celestial deluge. But that would have been too obvious, too easy. Thus, he decided to make it an INDOOR rain. Bold. But how to do it? Well, he could have had some memorial-goer light up a cigar or he could have had Jesse’s rambunctious son Samson pull a fire alarm. But that would have been too obvious, too easy. Enter: the giant flaming bird.

Jesse’s band, Ruckus, who once (almost) opened for Lynyrd Skynyrd (“Two of the original members”) chooses to play, of course, a Lynyrd Skynyrd song, “Free Bird”, and Jesse chooses to accentuate the performance with a giant model bird the stagehand will make “fly” above – “pull the pulley across slow and soulful.” But the stagehand is hapless and, thus, as it must, the flying bird veers too close to a stage light, is set ablaze and, in turn, sets the strung banner bearing Drew’s dad’s motto – “If it wasn’t this it would be something else” (as in, if wasn’t this it would be a giant flaming bird) – ablaze before, inevitably, the flying bird breaks free from its pulley and crashes into a table far below, sparking a subsequent blaze. Cue the sprinklers! The band keeps playing. A conga line breaks out. Drew’s sister (Judy Greer) raises his arms to the heavens in one of the most tried & true shots of cinematic rainfall. Claire uses her flight attendant skills to guide people to safety. And Drew and Claire get their unspoken goodbye from across the room……in the rain.

The eternally reviled “Elizabethtown”, a film I have exalted so much Crowe himself once wrote me a letter that simply said “Dude, calm down, even I know it’s not that good”, is often accused by its horde of naysayers as being contrived. Google “Elizabethtown Movie Contrived” and you receive 911,000 results. Uff-da! And fair enough, I say. To each his or her own. You might say this goodbye in the rain is contrived.

I say it’s thinking outside the box.

My Favorite Movie Scene In The Rain

Andrew, the writer of most marvelous prose, over at Encore Entertainment recently hit on an incredible idea for blog-a-thon regarding our favorite movie scenes in the rain since scenes in the rain really are a significant staple of the cinema. Why is this? (I should note before I go any further that my native state of Iowa is currently in the midst of approximately its 17th 100 year flood in the last 5 years and so I know that rain can also symbolize direness and the wrath of that "happy-go-lucky" God of ours and so on and so forth and so please know, fellow Iowans, that I do not mean to belittle your plight. My heart is with you. You know it is.)

Viewers lost it at many different points during James Cameron's landmark 1997 opus "Titanic" (at least the viewers who enjoyed that film which is to say the viewers who actually have souls) since it is not an easy movie to watch when considering its primary topic is, you know, the sinking of the Titanic. But the scene that most got me....

It's after the ship has sunk and after Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate) has let go of Jack Dawson (Leo) by promising that she'll never let go and she hitches the ride on the Carpathia and the Carpathia is coming through New York Harbor and she's looking up at the Statue Of Liberty-

(Note: If you're one of those people who now wants to point out that the Statue Of Liberty would not have been lit up in 1912 or that Rose would not have been able to see it from that vantage point because the ship could not get that close to the island or whatever other inaccuracies you want to point out, well, I don't want to hear it. Okay? I DON'T EFFING WANT TO HEAR IT. Go back to reading your book about the invention of the cotton gin or whatever it is you un-romantics do.)

-and that soft rain is falling on her, cleansing her, washing away the atrocities her young eyes have been made to witness and her suffocating personal history, all of it, all these sins getting rinsed away by this divine drizzle, and then that guy comes up to her and asks "Can I take your name please, love?" and she looks at him and Kate - as only Kate Winslet can - doesn't go for any over-affections, she doesn't put any spin on her face or on her words, she doesn't try to sell it because she's smart enough to know she doesn't have to because the moment itself is bigger than any of that and she just replies "Dawson - Rose Dawson" and that's when I lost it. I had to burrow down in my seat in the pitiful hope that no one around me would hear my sniffles.

There have been many film "scholars" who have compared Cameron Crowe's "Say Anything" to "Titanic" for, oddly, having many of the same plot points, if you look closely. But those "scholars" actually fail to grasp the most apt and critical likeness. "The rain on the car is a baptism," John Cusack's Lloyd Dobler said into his trusty tape recorder. "The new me. Ice Man. Power Lloyd. My assault on the world begins now."

The rain on Rose DeWitt Bukater in New York Harbor is a baptism. The new her. Rocket Queen. Rose Dawson. Her assault on the world began right then.