Before Midnight (Movie Review)

Rating:

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The “1-4-0”: ‘Before Midnight’: wait to be reeled in, have your heart exposed, trounced & then mended by an incredible visceral dialogue. A special film.The Gist: Jesse and Celine (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) first met in their twenties in Before Sunrise (1995), reunited in their thirties in Before Sunset (2004), and now, in Before Midnight, we follow their lives in Greece where the uncertainty of love and marriage is explored with great thought.

The Highlights: The dialogue is the star of this film. Director Richard Linklater has a magical ability to open up the heart and  dissect the complexities of human love like no one else. The dialogue he writes up should be put in a museum for future study since it manages to really hit the emotional core of anyone who has gone through the hardships of a relationship. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy’s comfortability on camera with each other is pure joy viewing. They’re so natural together that you don’t know if they were improvising or acting. The explosive last 30 minutes are cinema masterpiece where acting and dialogue unite to lay bare all of our most deeply concealed fears about marriage and eternal love. You’re in for a treat. 

The Lowlights: For those not used to dialogue movies, Before Midnight might seem slow and void of “entertainment value”. The entertainment is in the exploration of the message it wants to deliver, not in delighting you with CGI eye candy. It’s an art house film and one that will stay with you for days.

Pay or Nay?: You’ll like it at first, love it days later. Before Midnight is not the best of Linklater’s trilogy, but it is better than any other romance film out there since 2009’s ‘(500) Days of Summer’.

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