The Lost Art of Calling Someone on the Damn Phone

My wife makes fun of how easily I cry. She’s more stoic than I could ever be and thinks it’s especially funny how movies—not just well-written death scenes, but most Christmas movies and hit-you-over-the-head Hollywood sentimentality—always get me. She plays this game when we’re in a movie theater where she’ll look over at me to guess the exact scene I will start crying. At home, she’ll just ask out loud, without looking, “Crying?” The easiest, she’s told me, is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love. The emotional climax comes over a phone call, and, she says, “You’ve always been weird about phone calls.”