Nine years on, Jesse and Céline are still talking. That is the whole premise of Before Midnight, and it holds. This is the third and final film in Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, and it finds the couple older, married, and raising twin daughters. The movie is a conversation, not a plot, and it earns both its length and its reputation.
Jesse, played by Ethan Hawke, is a successful novelist. Céline, played by Julie Delpy, is at a career crossroads after her NGO’s wind farm gets rejected at the last minute. The tension comes from their son Hank, now a teenager, who is spending the summer in Greece with them but will fly back to Chicago to live with his mother, Jesse’s ex-wife. Jesse laments missing Hank’s formative years; Céline admits Jesse confided in her about having his first kiss on this very vacation.
“Everything’s better with maturity.”
That tagline is the film’s thesis. The movie is less interested in spectacle than in the texture of a relationship as it ages. The conversations run long, and they should. Jesse and Céline argue about their parenting, about the ruined they skip on their drive, about the apple Jesse eats while Céline sleeps. They talk about their initial meetings in Vienna, wondering if they would have become a couple if they met as they are now.
The film also deals with mortality directly. Jesse’s father contacts him to join the family in Texas, and Jesse learns that his grandmother, nearly a hundred years old, has died. Her ashes will be mixed with those of his grandfather, who died a year ago, after seventy years together. The weight of that news hangs over the final stretch of the movie, giving the arguments about Hank and the wind farm a larger context.
Linklater, Hawke and Delpy shot the film entirely on the Peloponnese coast in Southern Greece, including the Kardamyli home formerly owned by author Patrick Leigh Fermor. The setting is beautiful, but it is the backdrop, not the story. The performances carry everything. Hawke and Delpy have spent decades building these characters, and their chemistry remains electric.
Before Midnight premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2013, and reached a wide release on June 14 through Sony Pictures Classics. It grossed $23 million worldwide, the highest of the trilogy.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Classics.
Key Facts Box
- Title: Before Midnight (2013)
- Director: Richard Linklater
- Writer: Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke
- Runtime: 109 minutes
- Genres: Romance, Drama
- Gross: $23 million worldwide
- Score: 9.4/10
The Verdict
Before Midnight is a quiet masterpiece. It trusts its actors and its audience to find meaning in pauses, in unfinished sentences, in the way a person looks at their partner across a restaurant table. The film asks hard questions about love, parenthood, and the passage of time, and it answers them with honesty rather than sentimentality. This is a movie about aging that never feels aged.
9.4 out of 10.
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