Before Midnight (2013)

USA / Greece, 109 minutes
Director: Richard Linklater
Writers: Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke, Kim Krizan
Photography: Christos Voudouris
Music: Graham Reynolds
Editor: Sandra Adair
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

The third installment of the Before series, which has increasingly become a collaboration by director and cowriter Richard Linklater and its two stars, Ethan Hawke as Jesse and Julie Delpy as Celine, is probably the weakest. Thirds in sequels usually do poorly as movies, but that's not exactly the problem, partly because this is not a typical series. Before Midnight certainly has some of the strongest scenes of any of them. But the ending is hard to believe, flipping an unlikely switch out of the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? territory it has wandered at deepest levels and into sparkly upbeat, in order, one suspects, to help guarantee another installment (providing everyone makes it another nine years). It's a bit of a fairy tale, in other words, and not in a good way or one that really works with the title. Jesse and Celine are more like pumpkins until midnight, at which point they become a prince and a beautiful love relationship with glass slipper, etc. Maybe—it's also ambiguous, as all the endings are.

I should say I've never liked Before Sunrise that much, which possibly leaves me with just the second, Before Sunset. I had to check it out again this week just to be sure it's as good as I remember. It is. The strength of the later movies is that they look like real relationships. Before Sunset has a good deal of hope and an ingenious way to make it believable, with a relationship renewed before our eyes. In Before Midnight, Jesse and Celine are married, with twin girls, and settled after nine years into a comfortable life—conventional bohemian bourgeois, more or less, on vacation in the summer in Greece. Dig the scenery.

Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007)

USA, 117 minutes
Director: Sidney Lumet
Writer: Kelly Masterson
Photography: Ron Fortunato
Music: Carter Burwell
Editor: Tom Swartwout
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Albert Finney, Marisa Tomei, Rosemary Harris, Michael Shannon, Bryan F. O'Byrne, Amy Ryan, Aleksa Palladino, Leonardo Cimino, Blaine Horton

Director Sidney Lumet's last picture came more than 50 years after his first, and it's a decent clinic in all the things he was good at. We learn by way of DVD extras, for example, that Lumet was at pains to describe Before the Devil Knows You're Dead as a melodrama rather than a thriller. With the caper crime at the center of it I've always been inclined to think of it more as a thriller, but he makes a good argument. One change he made to the original screenplay was to make Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Hank (Ethan Hawke) brothers rather than friends. It's simple, but amps up the tension between them, notably over the ongoing affair Hank is having with Andy's wife Gina (Marisa Tomei)—amps it up by approximately an infinite degree. Where it might have been just sad and pathetic, it now has more potential for convulsive epic tragedy.

In fact, this is a tremendously agonizing story, maybe even unbelievable in synopsis, but pulled off by the skill of Lumet and his cast and crew. I was reminded a little of Dancer in the Dark, which I was talking about a few weeks ago as hurtling vertiginously into darkness. The same arc is at play here, but whereas Dancer director Lars von Trier insists on distancing himself from the emotional wallop, Lumet rushes in fully embracing exactly that, shading everything he can think of to make it as fraught as possible. On the DVD commentary track, Hoffman points out a close-up of a finger squeezing a trigger and says that's when he knew he was working on a melodrama.

Before Sunset (2004)

USA, 80 minutes
Director: Richard Linklater
Writers: Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke, Kim Krizan
Photography: Lee Daniel
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

Nine years later, in the story and in reality, our heroes meet again. The rendezvous they had planned for six months after their wonderful night, agreeing to meet again in Vienna, never came off, at which point they had no way of reaching each other again. That's one of the problems with extravagant romance. Too many pitfalls. Now thirtysomething Jesse (played by Ethan Hawke) has written a moderately successful novel based on that night and is in Paris to give a reading, at which thirtysomething Celine (played by Julie Delpy) surprises him by showing up. He must leave for the airport that evening to fly home, but almost immediately they pick up where they left off, and if the years between have not been very hard on either one they have not been so kind either. They have been fortunate in their careers and material circumstances, but Celine has gone from one unsatisfying, vaguely distant relationship to another, while Jesse finds himself trapped in a loveless marriage. This is by far the better of the two Before Sun--- movies Linklater has made about them, and it's so good that it even tends to redeem the slender offerings of the first, instantly creating a context that widens and deepens both. Jesse and Celine are still young, in their early 30s, but life has already begun to work its erosions on them—which instantly, and profoundly, creates the stakes that were never there in the first adventure. Now they both know too well, and indeed acknowledge as much explicitly to one another, that the kind of opportunity they once found with one another does not often come along, and must be seized when it does. Unless, that is ... unless it's just another cruel false illusion—could that be? The kind they both also know so well now. As do we all; and here is our connecting point. After all, they only had that one night in Vienna and, now, this one afternoon in Paris. Is it real? How much do they really know each other? How can they know? And so they cling to one another instinctively, almost desperately, unwilling to part, fondling the connection, nervously joking and deeply engaged and occasionally sparring out of doubt and pain and insecurity, but never without an unmistakable sense of the ludicrous, even dangerous, rightness of it. They open up to one another so beautifully. He tells her how he was thinking of her on his wedding day, thought he saw her even. Her face grows quiet. It might have actually been her. Inevitably they end up at her apartment, where she plays him a lovely song on her guitar. "Baby," she tells him, "you are gonna miss that plane."

Before Sunrise (1995)

USA/Austria/Switzerland, 105 minutes
Director: Richard Linklater
Writers: Richard Linklater, Kim Krizan
Photography: Lee Daniel
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy

A deceptively slight romance with a concept at once so familiar and so simple as to verge on hackneyed. American twentysomething Jesse (played by Ethan Hawke) meets Parisian twentysomething Celine (played by Julie Delpy) when they are both traveling by train in Europe. After a brief conversation, Celine, on an impulse, gets off the train with Jesse in Vienna and they spend the night together, roaming the city, talking, growing closer, and ultimately falling in love. In the morning Jesse will be flying back to the U.S. and Celine will reboard the train and continue on to Paris. Jesse is naturally charming, composed of equal parts swagger and unsure timidity, while Celine is also charming, but more brash and outspoken, unwilling to trust a man but unwilling not to. Both, more than anything, are young, happy to indulge romance and idealism. They barely have money to feed themselves, let alone for a place to spend the night, but the company of one another provides all the entertainment and comforts they need—or, indeed, that we as an audience might require. In fact, for the most part director and co-writer Richard Linklater does an admirable job of staging a legendary first date, a greatest night of one's life, the sense of astonishment and joy and the continual testing and retesting of a deep and powerful newfound connection with another person. If we are lucky, we have had an experience like this in our lives, and it's not hard to recognize a version of it here: the conversation that never wants to end, happily unloading all the stories of one's short life, with startling happenstance encounters along the way, flare-ups of difference quickly smoothed over, and an unforced wandering from place to place amidst wondrous sights and experiences. The late-night weariness that occasionally threatens is quickly overcome by the energy of the connection that burns through it. But for all that, some patience and indulgence may be required here. The story amounts to little more than said date, virtually devoid of any personal context other than what one character tells the other, or stakes of any kind except insofar as they have seduced us into caring for them. And I don't know about you, but nothing Celine has to offer (let alone Jesse) much gives me any reason to care particularly deeply, beyond a general happiness in seeing others connect and do well. Speaking strictly for myself, that's not going to get me to Paris or anyplace like it without having to pay for a ticket first.

Before the Flood (1974)

I think of this as coming after the flood and so remembering its title often induces cognitive dissonance. More pity me. OK, it's basically a decent collection of Dylan songs, performed live by the man with The Band, but it doesn't seem to me to live up to much of its advance billing. As example, see what Robert Christgau wrote about it at the time. Needless to say, perhaps, YMMV.

Before and After Science (1977)

"King's Lead Hat" The ideas of ambience and the Oblique Strategies deck of cards really entered the picture at least two years earlier with Another Green World, often characterized as his best album. So it's no surprise that this is shot through with quirky and lulling abstractions of sound that look forward to the plink-plonk/empty spaces that would largely dominate the rest of his career. They slow the proceedings here, but that said, it must also be noted that the proceedings here are fine enough to overcome anything.

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