Maybe
@Damon Vincenti may give us his professional opinion on S2 finale, but I think Joe was in character (or Alice/director told him to act that way)… if Charlie would have reacted as Nick, we would have had a tear-fest, we would have drowned in tears and the scene would have been unbearable. I”m not saying Charlie doesn’t show/have emotions in that scene, he just shows them not in a Nick way.
have we ever watched Charlie crying? I’m thinking about it, but I can’t recall one single scene
For me, there are just so many great things about this scene, and I plan to show it to my students this semester.
Some of the things I love about it:
1) The use of a hand-held camera. This heightens the unsettled emotions of the characters. For example, when it cuts from the close-up of Charlie's "Everything's fine now" to a medium shot of Nick's worried response---"
Is everything OK?"---the camera is particularly unsteady on Nick, emphasizing how anxious he is.
I also think it was clever to frame Nick here in medium shot, and not centered, as it underlines his feeling of being left out of Charlie's inner battles.
2) When Nick then jumps off the bed and comes face to face with Charlie, the sudden change to close-ups of both boys really heightens the intimacy of the scene.
3) The cutting back and forth between Nick and Charlie is brilliant! Nick is mostly reacting here, and in a sense he's acting as a surrogate for us, as we too are hearing Charlie's heartbreaking revelations for the first time. In other words, his tears become our tears, and I think that's why so many viewers have been bowled over by Kit's acting here. And it
is wonderful, but the combination of the tight close-ups, editing (cutting back to him at the perfect moments) and the unsteady hand-held camera all add to the incredible intimacy of the moment as well. It's so well directed, as it makes us feel that we are privy to a very special private moment.
4) Joe's performance is equally good here. No tears---and that would be too much, I feel, to have them both crying---and the halting way he reveals the things that Charlie has bottled up inside him. We can really feel the tension in him as he reveals each thing, as well as the sense that he still hasn't told Nick everything.
Anyway, these are just some of the things that I love about this perfectly written/acted/directed/filmed/edited gem of a scene!