What, in your opinion, is the best death scene (or, really reaction to a death) that you’ve seen in a movie?
For me it would have to be SLC Punk (Starring a pre-Scooby Matthew Lillard).
Steveo, a hard as nails anarchist punk awakes at the end to find his best friend and roomate dead from an overdose of percocet. He transforms to a slobbery mess almost instantaneously as his whole world pretty much crumbles around him.
I remember listening to the commentary once, the director said they pretty much locked Lillard and Goorjian in a room with the cameras, and left them there for 30 minutes while Lillard just bawled. Re-watching it today, I realized that it’s probabaly one of the most realistic portrayals of a reaction to death I’ve ever seen.
Not too many people will have seen this one, but here goes.
I once watched a BBC(I think) mini-series on the life of Edward VII. His mom was Queen Victoria. The scene showing the passing of Albert, her husband, is remarkable for the performance of the actress playing the Queen. She’s a cool, reserved, introverted woman. As she realizes her husband is dead a look of horror, mixed with unbelief and denial, passes over her face. Then all her reserve breaks and she starts loudly wailing, crying her heart out. A lesser performer would make that look ridiculous, as it was you might say I was feeling her pain.
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly when Clint takes his cigarette (cigarillo?) out of his mouth, lets the dying guy smoke it, then puts it back in his mouth.
The kid’s last breath is an exhalation of the smoke.
(if I’m messing up my spaghettis, it’s only cause I haven’t seen them for a while, but I’m 90% sure it was TG, TB & TU)
I think this topic was done a while back, I’ll nominate Kevin Spacey in LA Confidential dying from a gunshot again. As the poster in the last thread said, you could just see the life draining out of his eyes.
Mercutio’s death in R+J - the Luhrman version. I think of that scene everytime the actor is being a goofball on Lost, and wonder if he shouldn’t have stuck to Shakespear.
On the small screne, it’s got to be Joyce’s death on Buffy, episode “The Body”. We don’t see the death itself, but the aftermath. It’s the most realistic reaction to death I’ve ever seen - the relentless march of time when you’re just wishing everything would stop for a minute and let you figure things out. Life goes on, even when you wish it wouldn’t.
The American soldier stabbed to death by the big German soldier in a bombed-out upstairs room in Saving Private Ryan. The German soldier soothingly talks to him as he jabs him deeper and deeper. Chilling.
I agree wholeheartedly about “The Body” . No cheesy last words, no theatrics. Just the heartbreaking scene when the death is discovered and the very real portrayal of the survivors’ responses. I own the dvd collection and I can’t bring myself to watch that episode again.