Before Midnight

Picking up nine years after Before Sunset (and 18 years after Before Sunrise), Before Midnight follows a married Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) as they’re forced to confront a series of relationship-based issues while on holiday in Greece. Filmmaker Richard Linklater, working from a script cowritten with Hawke and Delpy, has infused Before Midnight with exactly the sort of low-key and talk-heavy atmosphere one might’ve anticipated, with the movie’s opening half hour certainly delivering on the promise of the first two films in this ongoing series (ie there is, for example, an unbroken shot in a car that ranks with the best that the franchise has to offer). It’s only as the action moves to the quaint villa in which Celine and Jesse are vacationing that one’s interest first begins to wane, as Linklater offers up a selection of uninteresting, distracting periphery figures and devotes a good chunk of time to their decidedly irrelevant musings (ie there’s a dinner party that just seems to go on and on). The picaresque atmosphere, coupled with Hawke and Delpy’s expectedly engrossing work, ensures that the movie remains at least partially compelling even through its misguided stretches, however, and there’s little doubt that Before Midnight does pick up substantially once the emphasis is shifted back to Celine and Jesse’s exploits together. The movie culminates with a somewhat shocking sequence in which the central couple engages in a squirm-inducing (yet undeniably engrossing) marital spat; despite its effectiveness, this stretch almost feels as though it belongs in a different movie (ie it’s just jarring when compared to the entirety of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset). Linklater deserves credit for taking these characters to a place of authenticity, it seems, but there’s ultimately no denying that Before Midnight bears too few similarities to its thoroughly superior predecessors.

*** out of ****