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| Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy by the Mediterranean Sea on the poster for Richard Linklater's Before Midnight |
QUICK REVIEW:
Jesse and Celine of the two previous films in the Before trilogy, (Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004)), are now a married couple with two lovely twin daughters, who have just spend their summer together on the Greek Peloponnese peninsula. But as Jesse is sending his teenage son back on a plane to his ex-wife in the States, he feels that perhaps it is time that they should move with him over there.
The last Before film so far, (for who knows for sure that this will end as a trilogy?), starts marvelously in an airport and with a long car talking scene. A later dinner scene is perhaps a little long and over-populated with the extremely articulate Before types that Jesse and Celine seem to attract everywhere. - But it ends on a moving note.
SPOILER As the fight between the two breaks out, it is depressing because it is so real and such an accurate depiction of the way couples tend to behave in a midlife crisis situation.
Ethan Hawke (Training Day (2001)) is phenomenal, and so is Julie Delpy (Broken Flowers (2005)), although Celine definitely comes off as the most antagonistic. SPOILER The fight is steered back into romance in the end, but the way the married couple wear down each other's emotional blades, - which is really well captured here, - is still so disheartening that, for me, Before Midnight, though unmistakably great, is the least enjoyable in the trilogy.
In online forums others have attacked co-writer-director Richard Linklater, (who has written the films with Hawke and Delpy), for "trashing" the characters that have moved people profoundly since the first film. But these critics fail to accept that these characters and their relationship merely evolve and change in each 9 year span to some degree, just as real people do. That this change is heartbreaking in some sense is not something the artists are responsible for. This is just the way life turns out for many if not all people.
Related reviews:
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Richard Linklater: Boyhood (2014) or, Colored Mirror
Bernie (2011) - Linklater, Black and Hollandsworth's incredible true-crime dramedy
A Scanner Darkly (2006) - Dick and Linklater's drug-infested vision of the future
Watch the trailer for the film here
Cost: 3 mil $
Box office: 23.3 mil. $
= Huge hit
[Before Midnight was shot in the summer of 2012 in 15 days in and around Messenia, Greece. The film premiered at Sundance, played at Berlin International Film Festival and opened widest (897 theaters) in America on June 14th. It made 8.1 mil. $ (35 % of the total gross) domestically and was Oscar-nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, (adapted since its based on existing characters.) It became the 2nd best reviewed film of the year according to Rotten Tomatoes, only bested by Gravity (2013). It also appeared on a long row of critic's top 10 lists of 2013 and was nominated for and won a slew of awards.]
What do you think of Before Midnight?
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