Before Midnight (2013) ****/*****
One could look at Before Midnight as being a movie that’s 18 years in the making. That is, if one wants to pretend that it’s the third entry in a pre-planned trilogy — but that seems like it would be a pretty erroneous position to take. No, what seems to be the case is that director Richard Linklater and his stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy liked their 1995 film about two people meeting on a train and spending a day walking and talking through Vienna, Before Sunrise, so much, that nine years later they got together and decided they would make an update on where the characters were in their lives. That update was Before Sunset, and this time around Hawke and Delpy were not just the stars, they also co-wrote the script that saw their characters, Jesse and Celine, reuniting and spending another day together walking and talking, this time through Paris. Despite having big expectations it needed to meet, Before Sunset was very warmly received, so here we are another nine years later, watching Before Midnight.
Did Jesse and Celine end up finally getting together in a significant way after the cliffhanger ending of Before Sunset? To tell in a review would probably be a mistake, but what we can say is that Before Midnight picks up with their lives nine years later, toward the end of a summer they’ve spent together vacationing at the home of a famous author in Greece. Hawke and Delpy have once again co-written the script with Linklater, and the meat of the story they’ve concocted sees the duo getting away from all of the other people staying at the house, getting away from all of their adult responsibilities, and once again having a night to walk around a beautiful city together and interact. Happily, I can report that the third film does not break the streak of Before movies living up to their expectations. Somehow this trio of collaborators have once again managed to make a movie about two people walking and talking compelling, beautiful, and endlessly frustrating.
Seeing as these films are essentially about two characters engaging in drawn out conversations, the qualities that allow them to be so successful aren’t hard to predict. The Before formula relies on two things: good acting and a good script. We’ve seen Hawke and Delpy in enough things at this point in their careers to know they’re capable actors, but something really special happens when they get together and return to these roles. The instant they appear together on screen you know you’re looking at Jesse and Celine. The instant they open their mouths, no matter how old they are or what they’ve been through, you know you’re dealing with the same characters. Hawke and Delpy have defined these two so well over the years that they’ve begun to feel like real people. At one point in this movie, when Celine’s breasts get bared, I felt a little awkward, like I was seeing a woman I’ve known for a long time nude for the first time ever. The reaction was ludicrous, because Delpy has been topless in several other movies before, and the sight was really nothing new. To separate actress from character so severely in the audience’s mind shows that they’ve done some next level character building over the course of this trilogy.
The script that our trio of scribes have written here might be the best they’ve produced to date. Not only does it include all of he insight into humanity and interpersonal relationships that one would expect from a Before movie, but it’s also the most clever and funny work they’ve done, by far. When I was looking over the notes I took while watching, it struck me that the bulk of what I ‘d written was just lines that I liked that I had copied down for posterity. Those sorts of notes don’t prove to be very useful, but they show you just how charmed you were by a movie while you were watching it. That’s not to say that the humor here comes at the expense of any emotion either. Heck, the screenwriting in Before Midnight is so good that a brief speech given by an old lady who we don’t really know much about is enough to get you choked up.
One shouldn’t go into the film expecting it to be a comfortable and easy continuation of what has come before it though. This one takes a few more chances, it goes a few places that don’t quite fit into the Before formula, and it’s possible that it could turn a few fans off. For the first time ever really, we get scenes where Jesse and Celine talk to other people. We see how they interact with other close relations, we see how they behave in group situations, and the change-up is actually really refreshing. That could be because Linklater and company don’t overstep their bounds though. Before things can stray too far from the formula, they get the duo off alone with ample opportunity to bounce dialogue off each another uninterrupted, and you’ll be happy to know that Celine still has trouble regulating her emotions, and Jesse still thinks far too much of his own cleverness.
The riskier change this film makes is in how dark it goes and how much tension gets introduced into its plot. In both Before Sunrise and Before Sunset we’re just enjoying getting to watch Jesse and Celine feel each other out, and the will they/won’t they aspect of their flirtations don’t really become an issue until the very end of the films. This movie is quite a bit different. After this many years, our protagonists are long past the point of feeling each other out, and instead of focusing on what connects them, we’re focusing more on the differences that could tear them apart. The writers know that we’re emotionally invested in this relationship at this point, that we want these two together, so they introduce the idea that they might be irreparably separated early on, and then they turn the screws as much as possible as we watch the chasm between them widen. The dark material here is definitely handled well, but for longtime fans who largely return to watching these movies as comfort food, it could be a fairly difficult change of tone to accept.
