Golden Muriel for Best Film of 2013

Before Midnight (Richard Linklater) [345.5 points /32 votes]

"Growing up and progressing through various relationships, romantic and otherwise, presents us with a lot of examples of human interaction to consider. When it comes to romance, I specifically have two such influences that forever wrestle inside me, Malick-style. One is the emotional wreck of the time in my life that my parents were together. (They are now divorced, for the betterment of them as well as my sister and me, but the time still registers as a failure, the bitter episodes of which continue to resonate). The other is my grandparents’ 60-some-odd years of marriage, a relationship that began when the army stationed my grandfather in England and he met a beautiful redhead of 16, with whom he fell in love and, after some months of foreign correspondence, married and raised four kids with.

My grandfather is an intellectual, the man in my life from whom I draw my love of most things cultural — film, of course, but also writing and language, the art of speaking and debating and weighing sides of an argument. All that is from him. My grandmother’s strength comes from emotional openness, compassion and empathy compensating for whatever academic shortcomings never finishing high school and choosing the path of a young mother may have created for her. I’ve witnessed the emotional fissures created by the dissonance of their personalities, but I’ve also witnessed how they’ve overcome them, and so it’s their example that I’ve tried to follow now that I myself have found love.

But it helps to have other models with their own nuances to draw from, and in the realm of the cinema, few modern examples offer a more rewarding glimpse of the changes and challenges of a relationship across the years than that chronicled in Richard Linklater’s Before... films.

In truth, I’ve always found the 1995 inaugural entry in this series to be, at least in the shadow of what was to come, slight. Before Sunrise found two young, beautiful souls — the American Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and the French Céline (Julie Delpy) — in the throes of love during one rapturous evening in Vienna, starting with a chance encounter on a train and including a deluge of perhaps too-scripted conversational musings about love and culture and the things young, largely carefree people tend to talk about, albeit with a cleverly knowing dose of naiveté. At the end they part, with a genuine sense of melancholy hanging over the whole thing. Lovely, to be sure, but un-exceptional — at least in its scope.

Then, in 2004, Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy created an addendum. Nine years later, Jesse and Céline’s paths cross again. Jesse’s published a novel about his one blissful eve with Céline (one aspect of this story I’ve honestly always found a little overly cute), and Paris, Céline’s home, is one stop on his book tour. Céline attends the signing and the two rekindle before spending another evening together, this time in more staid reminiscence. Before Sunset is when this series becomes vital - as a lens through which to both embrace and disillusion nostalgia, as a soulful and brilliantly wrought example of how the changes in two peoples’ lives affect their perceptions of each other in both the present and the past, and how they themselves can reflect upon that past with people who have no knowledge of their present. It’s one of the great American films of the last decade, but the follow up is even better.

Before Sunset signed off with one of modern cinema’s most indelible moments: Céline slinkily dances around her apartment to the strains of a live Nina Simone crooning “Just in Time”. Then, turning and intimating Nina’s pursed-lip sass, she warns her former and possibly present lover, “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane.” Until last year — though we could certainly hazard a guess — we were never completely certain if the allure of Nina and Céline in that cozy apartment was enough to keep Jesse planted on that couch. Now we are, and thanks to some expertly played exposition sprinkled throughout Before Midnight, we know a lot of other things about their life in the interim as well.

Midnight begins as Jesse bids farewell to the son we knew he had with the wife he wasn’t happy with in Sunset. They’re at the airport after spending the summer together, and you can tell that the separation is hard for Jesse. Soon he arrives back at the car, where not only is Céline waiting, but also two tiny sleeping blondes in the backseat - children he’s had with Céline, as we learn. As is the hallmark of the series (at least since Sunset), a beautifully unforced dialogue unravels between the two on the drive back to their summer getaway in Greece. What’s already apparent is that, while the two have enjoyed some good times in their years together, the fairytale ending many imagined for them has not been effected. Their past includes a bitter divorce and ensuing custody battle, and the couple’s divergent roots in France and America have caused a constant and enduring strain on their relationship.

The new film also elects to sacrifice one of the principal tenets of the series by introducing the voices of other characters outside of the central couples’. Céline and Jesse are staying at the home of a renowned Greek author, who has invited the younger writer and his family to spend the summer with him and an assortment of friends and kin. These other personages all get their moment in which to offer up wisdom, humor, and biographical details during Before Midnight’s crowing set piece, a lengthy dinner table conversation that encompasses all the themes explored in the previous films, as well as a few new ones. Much of the conversation is given over to more cynical opinions on the war of the sexes, the needlessness of everlasting love in the modern age, and some grumpiness about technology. But tellingly, the final monologue is reserved for an elderly woman who’d otherwise been silent; it concerns a guilelessly romantic reminiscence about the woman’s late husband, and how much he meant to her. That it still finds room for some carefully unpretentious philosophy about how “we appear, and disappear... so important to some, but just passing through” is testament to the series’, and this installment in particular’s, underlying intelligence.

Another expansion made here allows for the setting of the film to become its own kind of character. While the Vienna of Sunrise and the twilight-hued Paris of Sunset had a presence in those films, Greece is an integral part of Midnight in ways both sardonic (there are several jokes made about the country and how its histories of tragedy render it a dubious vacation spot) and existential (this story had to be told away from both Jesse and Céline’s home, to better catalyze the moment when they each must decide where to return). Even more so than with the real-time gambit of Sunrise, this is a film that truly embraces European arthouse aesthetics, from the loving homage to Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray to the perhaps-coincidental similarity to recent years’ other European cross-cultural walk-and-talk essay on relationship dynamics. And with a sharp understanding of his film’s grammar, Linklater ensures that his landscape comments on his characters as much they do on the landscape.

So this becomes the second time Linklater’s saga has achieved its own unique vitality - unique because Midnight exists and probes at the anatomy of a relationship for a dissimilar purpose than Sunset did, at least to a point. It offers more of a range of perspectives on its thematic issues in a few impeccably chosen scenes; it represents the series’ high-watermark in terms of filmic accomplishment; and it refracts in its writing how compatible personalities in the short term can grow incompatible over the long haul, how extenuating circumstances can mount and diminish the exclusivity of even the happiest couple, and how geographical separation continues to loom over its central lovers. Most importantly — and daringly — it holds the couple themselves accountable for failure, as pettiness and an inability to see what good they have begins to put their relationship in critical jeopardy.

And as an example of love to be studied and learned from, the film offers an in-the-moment specificity that’s more valuable to me than any I could take from my own family’s history. I met the woman I’m now with while far away from home — both my born-and-raised home (Cape Cod) and the home of my adulthood happiness (New York) — on what was intended to be a year’s leave to China, teaching children English more or less to kill time until economic conditions in the States improved. Recently, my “you are gonna miss that plane” moment came and went: my contract to the school that employs me ended, and so much of me wanted to return to America, to my own friends and family. But the allure of love has kept me here, laying a plan for the future that presents all kinds of obstacles, many of which parallel those that have come to threaten the stability of Céline and Jesse’s union by the finale of Midnight — another tactful and emotional cliffhanger of indecision and possibility.

I offer very specific information of my own life only to enforce the broadness of these films’ applicable qualities to others. The details of Céline and Jesse’s relationship that have come to the fore over the course of three talky films can be related to in myriad ways, and they derive their strength from that elasticity. But it’s this film in particular, with its wealth of ideas about life and love and its privileged perspective on middle age, that represents a real culmination, whether it’s the last of the series or not.

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At the Sundance Film Festival this year, Linklater had a new, well-received film called Boyhood, a project borne of an idea with an even greater scope than his Before’ films. Apparently it depicts the life of a boy from ages five to 18, and was filmed over 12 years, spanning its actor’s actual development into a man. It’s not a documentary - it’s a narrative film, scripted by Linklater, using his mainstay Hawke to play the boy’s father (which means he’s also aged that decade-plus during the filming). It strikes me that Linklater, too, has been going through a very extended period of growth as a director in the 23 years since his breakthrough stoner comedy Dazed and Confused. No one theme or motif has tied his work together in any meaningful way, from studio comedies like School of Rock to indie experiment Waking Life, from his animated sci-fi adaptation A Scanner Darkly to the misfire ensemble piece Fast Food Nation. (Well, no motif except for lots of talking.) I haven’t seen Boyhood yet, but the film’s reception to me suggests he may have found his masterstroke as a filmmaker: representing the vastness of life in a way that elides enough to be condensed into narrativized form, but not so much as to trivialize or sacrifice the greater gravity of his ambitions. Finding that balance is an extraordinary thing, and the Before series, Midnight in particular, bears the fruit of that alchemy." -- Sam C. Mac

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