"Neighbors" Nicely Uses Comedic Battle to Comment on Transition Into Parenting

Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne have a nice chemistry as the new parents.

Parenthood has been a phenomenal experience, but it's hard to deny that it has necessitated a slew of lifestyle changes for me and my wife. We don’t go out with our friends as much. We don’t sleep through the night. We don’t do a whole slew of things we used to do.

That includes going to the movie theater, which is one reason my writing on here has been so sparse the last few months. It’s crazy for a movie buff like me to type this, but we’re nearly half-way through the year, and I’ve seen a grand total of two 2014 releases, only one of which was in the theater (the other was The Monuments Men, which I reviewed here).

With that in mind, it’s kind of fitting that that one trip to the theater was to see Neighbors, a movie that focuses on a young married couple adjusting to becoming parents. Once or twice during the movie, my wife leaned over to me and said “That’s us,” and she wasn’t far off. Her analogy cast her as the luminous Rose Byrne and me as the shlubby Seth Rogen. That doesn’t exactly seem fair, but it’s hard to deny Neighbors is a movie that speaks to our current situation.

The dynamic between the central couple of the film is easy to relate to, and Rogen and Byrne have an easy chemistry that really elevates the material. This is a movie featuring a couple at war with a hard-partying fraternity, and while it contains the types of gags that setup would suggest, the most amusing scenes involve the interplay between the couple and the knowing observations about getting older.

And that’s appropriate, because while the movie is ostensibly about the conflict between the upstart parents and the douchey frat guys, that part is really just a clever externalization of what the film's actually about -- the internal clash between burgeoning responsibility and the reckless impulsiveness of youth. At one point in the film, the couple cripples the fraternity to the point that they can no longer host all-night parties. They’ve won, and yet the couple overplays their hand, mostly because the madness has livened up a life that has become overly ordinary.

In a refreshingly atypical move, the film makes the wife complicit in the shenanigans instead of relegating her to the sidelines as a disapproving nag. In addition to opening up more comedic possibilities, this decision helps enhance the thematic through line of the story. My favorite moment in the film involves a marital argument over who gets to be the Kevin James and who gets saddled with responsibility. It's a silly way in to a fine point about the roles society places on men and women that go way beyond the basic provider/nurturer paradigm.

You'd think the trailers would've ruined the DeNiro Party joke, but the

best part is the way Rogen reacts to some of the ill-conceived costumes.

Gender politics excluded, these themes also infiltrate the fraternity ranks. Although most of the brothers are one-note jokes, the main duo of Zac Efron and Dave Franco gets a significantly developed and wonderfully weird bromance that is colored by their vastly different views about the transition into adulthood. Both are fun-loving party guys, but for the Efron character, the fraternity is everything, while the Franco character sees it as fun bullshit he does in between classes and job fairs.

The four principles all do nice work. Rogen amiably anchors the film, and Franco brings an off-kilter energy to a role that's pretty close to the one he essayed in 21 Jump Street (reviewed here) – the savvy hip bro who happens to be cast as a villain.

Meanwhile, Efron brings a wounded humanity to a role that's pitched a lot darker than every other character in the piece. One scene in particular is so note-perfect creepy that I'm just as impressed with his willingness to go there as I am with the skill he displays in during it.

But it's Byrne who emerges as the film's MVP. Up until recently, sadness seemed her chief acting emotion (Wicker Park, Troy, Damages), but with Bridesmaids, Get Him to the Greek (reviewed here), and now this, she's proven to have a full range of comic talent as well. The script makes allowances to let her use her natural Australian accent, which enables her to really embrace the loose, improvisation style that an actor like Rogen thrives in.

Still, the film isn't perfect. The resolution is a little tidy, and since the movie plays things mostly straight, it’s a little jarring when the far-fetched plot points pop up. It's awfully hard to believe the cops or the schools' officials wouldn't hammer down on this fraternity more severely, especially given the bodily injury and intentional harassment with a child in the mix. And the idea that college girls would boldly purchase dildos made from the molds of frat boy penises is hard to accept, even though I appreciated the subplot as a gonzo critique on the tired trope of making a calendar to raise money.

Neighbors marks another success for Nicholas Stoller, a director who consistently puts an emphasis on grounding comedy with complex characters and relatable emotions. It doesn’t reach the heights of his Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but does exceed Get Him to the Greek and The Five Year Engagement. If the former’s a home run and the latter two are doubles, you can score Neighbors a triple. Regardless of how you classify the hits, the dude’s batting .1000. A-

Clooney Disappoints With Disjointed and Treacly "The Monuments Men"

The Monuments Men has a hell of a cast.

I expected to love The Monuments Men.

It features a plethora of actors I adore in George Clooney, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray, and John Goodman. It's based on a fascinating, true-life story about a platoon of art historians and curators tasked with reclaiming and returning art Hitler pillaged during WWII after it was discovered he planned to destroy it all if he lost the war. And it's written, directed and produced by Clooney, a Hollywood icon with eclectic tastes and a consistent desire to work on quality films.

 

And yet, having finally seen it, I have to say I'm disappointed. It's good in spurts and looks fantastic, but it's a tonal, episodic mess that's far too preachy and treacly for its own good. 

 

In case the trailer didn't give it away, The Monuments Men is a message movie. It has a theme -- art and culture are important to defining who we are and are worth risking your neck for -- and it hits that theme hard. 

Conceptually, that's a good thing, but unfortunately the film goes overboard on the sentimentality, straining for poignancy at every turn. The film's heart is in the right place, but it has too much on-the-nose monologuing and a laughable denouement that's a direct descendant of the one from the otherwise splendid Saving Private Ryan. The end result is a product that feels awfully artificial.

 

Meanwhile, the tone of the film is all over the place. Clooney seems to be going for the jauntiness of Ocean's 11 mixed with the schmaltz of a Capra film, which doesn't play to his strengths as a writer/director. Clooney has proven adept at serious civic lessons (Good Night, and Good Luck), but inept at light comedy (Leatherheads). Unfortunately, mixing the two together doesn't really work.

 

Bill Murray and Bob Balaban do a lot with a little, which I guess is

kind of their thing in general, so why not here.

All that being said, The Monuments Men's biggest problem is it's lack of narrative drive. The script breaks its characters into teams, sending them off on various objectives that don't really build toward anything in the way tasks would in a heist film along the lines of the Ocean films. This results in a movie that feels like a loosely connected series of vignettes, some of which are interesting, most of which feel like wheel spinning and all of which don't coalesce into a dynamic whole. The film has more in common with the likes of Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve than was probably intended.

 

The tandem of Murray and Bob Balaban get all the best material. There's a nice scene in which the two stumble into a Mexican standoff of sorts with an SS soldier, another where Murray gets emotional over a recorded message sent from his family at Christmas, and a third where the two come across a former Nazi we know to be a baddie but they do not. Each scene with these guys is interesting -- sadly that cannot be said about the rest of the Monuments Men.

 

Actually, that's not entirely fair -- Hugh Bonneville gets some nice grace notes to play in his brief role as a washed out alcoholic who gets a second chance to make something of himself as part of this operation. But the rest is pretty piss poor. Goodman and Jean Dujardin, last seen together on screen in The Artist, get the shortest shrift with a collection of scenes that add up to very little and aren't even involving or cute in and of themselves (a factor that saves many of the vignettes featuring the likes of Clooney, Damon and Blanchett). 

 

Thinking on the film, I'm left to wonder if this story might have made for a better documentary. In such a context, the disjointed nature wouldn't seem so bad, and more time could've been spent with historians and the men themselves (or, at the very least, their descendants).

 

As it is, this is a flawed film that mostly wastes the assembled talent because the script doesn't really work on the macro level, despite some micro successes. I'd still rather have my movie stars working on whiffs like this than lower ceiling cookie cutter crap, but The Monuments Men just didn't work for me. C+

"This Is The End" and "The World's End" Provide Distinct Pleasures, Despite Similar Topics and Uninspiring Finales

This Is the End features comedy actors playing themselves with
the narcissism dialed up to 11.

It’s funny how often two extremely similar movies hit theaters in the same relative time period. Deep Impact and Armageddon. Antz and A Bug’s Life. Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down. Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman. The list goes on, but I’ll stop here.

Joining that list last year was a pair of comedies about a group of guys dealing with the end of the world – This is the End and The World’s End.

Interestingly, these films not only share the same basic plot; they produce similar results as well. Both manage to mine comedy for pathos related to the changing dynamics of friendship, and both are pretty fantastic until they run out of steam in the final reel.

The former comes from the minds of Judd Apatow disciples Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg , and stars a number of Apatow’s regular players (Rogen, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Craig Roberts, Danny McBride, and Jay Baruchel) as outlandish versions of themselves. They, along with a number of other celebrities, deal with a very biblical apocalypse while hiding out in Franco’s Hollywood home.

The latter is the third and final film in the Cornetto trilogy, a series of film collaborations between filmmaker Edgar Wright and stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost that put the duo in various genre sendups. Previously, they riffed on zombie flicks (Sean of the Dead) and buddy cop action comedies (Hot Fuzz). Here the focus is on Gary King, a bottomed-out addict who reunites his former school chums (Frost, Paddy Considine, Martin Freeman, Eddie Marsan) to complete a bar crawl in their home town, which just so happens to have been invaded by body-snatching aliens.

The World's End offers heavy drama wrapped in a genre-riffing shell.

Although they each use the end of the world to wax poetic on male relationships, they both really explore different dynamics beyond that. This is the End examines hypocrisy, celebrity and religion, while The World’s End deals with addiction, regret and the perils of technology.

This Is the End is easily the funnier of the two – it’s probably the funniest film of the last few years really. That’s not a knock on The World’s End, which is actually more of a dark drama in action-comedy clothing. Gary is certainly the most developed character in the two films, and Pegg really sells the guy’s pain.

Tech aspects are certainly better in The World’s End, but that’s to be expected. Unlike their previous writing collaborations (Superbad, Pineapple Express, The Green Hornet), Rogen and Goldberg avoided having an accomplished director take the reins, opting instead to direct This Is The End themselves. They do a competent job, but it’s clear they aren’t visual stylists. Wright on the other hand – that’s sort of his forte, so it’s hardly surprising that The World’s End has some knockout visuals. A dynamite fight scene in a bar bathroom is particularly impressive.

Ultimately, I prefer This Is The End – it’s a hell of a lot funnier, and it just feels a lot fresher than The World’s End, which is basically a retread of many of the themes of Sean of the Dead, just with Pegg and Frost switching archetypes.

Much like Hot Fuzz, The World’s End drags at parts and could’ve benefited from another round in the editing room. That’s sort of a weird thing to type because it’s such a tightly plotted piece, especially compared to This Is The End, which, still feels more finely trimmed even though it’s practically the same length and has a meandering, improvisational vibe to it.

In the end, both films are worth recommending, and I definitely think they’re distinct enough that viewers won’t feel like they’re watching the same movie twice.

This Is the End A-, The World’s End B

Jake Gyllenhaal Shines in Thought-Provoking "Prisoners"

Jake Gyllenhaal brings the intensity in Prisoners.

Although commercials made it seem like a variation on the Taken formula, Prisoners is actually a pretty serious drama with a lot on its mind.

In general, it occupies the same playground as Gone Baby, Gone, another pulpy and thought-provoking crime thriller about an investigator’s dogged pursuit to solve a child abduction case. But there’s also a strong political thread that recalls Zero Dark Thirty in the way it forces viewers to consider the value of torture.

The film revolves around the reactions of two sets of parents (Hugh Jackman and Mario Bello and Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) when their little girls are abducted by an unknown villain. When a mentally unstable suspect (Paul Dano) emerges and the cops aren’t able to find suitable evidence to charge him, the Jackman character takes measures into his own hands. Each parent responds to his actions in a different way, serving as analogs for the differing ways people respond to the use of torture tactics.

To say much more about the plot would ruin the film, but I will say that it’s beautifully lensed by Roger Deakins and that, although quite long, it’s well paced and grippingly directed by director Denis Villeneuve. The film also closes with a perfect denouement, which is a rarity in movies and another way in which it echoes both Gone Baby, Gone and Zero Dark Thirty.

Jackman is great as the desperate dad driven to extreme measures, but it’s Jake Gyllenhaal as the cop on the case who steals the movie. Although his Detective Loki handles many of his early encounters with a practiced calm, there’s a coiled-spring intensity to him that’s emphasized by his twitchiness and constant blinking. This is a man with a past (there’s all those tattoos and one scene implies he’s the product of an abusive childhood), and while he’s instantly sympathetic, there’s an unsettling sense that the guy could just go off at any moment.

Loki is a great character, and like J.J. Gittes in Chinatown or Patrick Kensie in Gone Baby, Gone (I know, I keep bringing up that movie, but it’s so good), he’s a detective you want to see tackle other cases in other movies. That’s unlikely to happen, but there’s no denying that Gyllenhaal, often cast for gentle quirkiness, is a total revelation in the role. Even being a fan of his previous work, I wasn’t really prepared for what he brings to the table here. It’s easily a top five performances from 2013 in my book, even if it didn’t get treated that way during awards season.

There’s a high level of melodrama on display and the film has the type of circumstantial “everything fits together” web that often plagues crime dramas. For those reasons, not to mention its dark subject matter and general dreariness, Prisoners isn’t for everyone. However, I found it to be one of the better films from last year. Ultimately, the character work, ace tech aspects and thematic and tonal strengths of the movie outweigh any negatives. A-

"Dallas Buyers Club" and "Mud" Justify the McConaissaince

It's that damn McConaughey. He's so hot right now!

Considering Matthew McConaughey’s recent Oscar win, the fervor surrounding True Detective and his lead part in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film, it’s apparent that we are in the eye of the McConaissaince. As a result, this seems a perfect time to finally put together some thoughts on Dallas Buyers Club and Mud, two 2013 entries I enjoyed quite a bit but never got around to reviewing. I figure it's definitely a good idea to strike before the McConalash sets in.

As a long-time McConaughey defender, I've enjoyed every minute of his comeback. It’s been funny to see the reactions of so many people who had previously written him off solely based on a few paycheck gigs in hollow romantic comedies. Guy always had screen presence to burn, and although he’s limited in some ways by an unshakable accent, he actually operates within a pretty wide range.

At the Oscars, Ellen joked that McConaughey is dirty pretty, but that’s actually an accurate description of his general movie persona. He possesses an oily magnetism that naturally suggests a seedy slickster or a morally compromised antihero, but then there’s the likable swagger and the intense vulnerability bubbling under the surface. He’s sort of a new age Michael Douglas, albeit with a six pack and a Texas twang.

McConaughey deviates from that wheelhouse occasionally (i.e. Contact, Amistad and The Wedding Planner), but like many good actors, he’s found his greatest success by playing into and off of his stock archetype. That assessment is certainly true of Dallas Buyers Club and Mud.

Dallas Buyers Club is a biopic about Ron Woodroof, a homophobic, womanizing good old boy who contracted AIDS in the early ’80s back when it was largely looked at as a gay disease. When Ron realizes the U.S. medical system and the ass-backwards FDA can’t help him, he decides to go south of the border to gain access to unapproved drugs. Soon, with the help of a transvestite partner named Rayon (Jared Leto), he begins smuggling the drugs into America and selling them to fellow AIDS sufferers as part of a monthly membership called the Dallas Buyers Club.

Leto and McConaughey lost a lot of weight for Dallas Buyers Club.

It’s interesting to me that this film languished so long in developmental limbo, because, beyond the topic of AIDS, it’s basically a conventional David vs. Goliath movie, one I suspect most would enjoy if they could get past their discomfort with what they perceive as “gay themes.” The film casts a critical eye on the FDA for being in bed with Big Pharmaceutical Companies to the detriment of the public, but it’s mostly an inspirational character piece about personal growth, redemption and the strength of the human spirit. A large part of the narrative hangs on the growing friendship that develops between Ron and Rayon, and it is all reminiscence of the similarly affecting dynamic Denzel Washington and Tom Hanks shared in Philadelphia.

The film starts like a bat out of hell and then gets into a comfortable rhythm before basically petering out. There’s a structural imbalance to the film, but it is buoyed by an excellent cast that includes winning support from Jennifer Garner, Steve Zahn and Griffin Dunn. McConaughey and Leto both won Oscars for their transformative performances, and while I probably wouldn't have gone with either of them in the stacked year that was 2013, the awards are well deserved. Leto does about everything he can to make Rayon into more than a walking plot device, and McConaughey owns the screen. I know some were annoyed McConaughey rode his comeback story to a victory on Oscar night, particularly at the expense of Leonardo DiCaprio, but this performance feels more charged and awards worthy than those by recent winners like Colin Firth and Jean Dujardin.

Although Dallas Buyers Club received the bulk of the attention, Mud is actually the more interesting McConaughey film to be released last year. Steeped in southern lore and magical realism and populated by a community of river dwellers, Mud instantly recalls last year’s excellent Beasts of the Southern Wild, but it is largely a homage to the works of Mark Twain. There are stand-ins for Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Jim, and there’s even a character named Tom Blankenship (Sam Shepard), which the internet tells me is the name of the man who inspired Huck Finn. The film even has the feel of classic American literature due to its poetic atmosphere, thematic parallels and rampant symbolism (one could easily imagine a term paper on the significance of the titular character’s shirt or the evocative image of a boat lodged high in a tree).

McConaughey plays Mud, a fugitive wanted for murder and hiding out in the aforementioned boat on a deserted island in the Mississippi River. When Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone (Jacob Loffland), two tween boys from Arkansas, encounter him on an exploratory adventure, Mud makes them a deal. If they’ll bring him food and help him make contact with his long lost love Juniper (Reese Witherspoon), he’ll gift them his pistol and grant them the squatter’s rights to the boat. Neckbone is intrigued by the pistol, while Ellis is mostly captivated by the romance of it all.

Ellis takes center stage for much of the story, and the film is ultimately a fable about a boy coming to grips with the mad complexities of love. He’s struggling with both the dissolution of his parents’ marriage and his infatuation with an older girl, and in Mud he seems to a have found a kindred romantic soul. He holds out hope that the connection between Mud and Juniper can confirm his faith in love, which can often seem like a cruel joke in the way it melds euphoria with abject disappointment.

The three lead characters of Mud would fit right into a Twain novel.

There’s a lot going on in the film, and writer/director Jeff Nichols juggles most of it very well. While we see the entirety of Ellis’ relationship with his crush, the dynamic between his parents (Sarah Paulson and Ray McKinnon) is fragmented and the one between Mud and Juniper isn't on screen at all. We see what Ellis sees and understand as he understands, and it speaks to the mastery of what Nichols has done that confusing character motivations on the part of some of the adults (especially the women) come into sharp focus as the film reaches its conclusion.

If there’s a misstep, it’s in the inclusion of a subplot involving Neckbone’s uncle. While it allows Nichols regular Michael Shannon to log some screen time, the whole thing feels inconsequential and adds unnecessary bloat to a film that would've been well served by cleaving off 10 minutes.

The below the line aspects are all top notch, and there’s some really great and subtle acting on display here. Both kids give emotive lived-in performances, and Witherspoon does well with a tricky role, striking the right balance as a woman intrigued by grand romanticism, but ultimately reticent and skeptical. And as was the case in Out of the Furnace (reviewed here), Shepard gets to be an old bad ass, but this time he gets a bit more of an opportunity to flex his acting muscles.

As for McConaughey, I’d argue that outside of Rust Cole, this is the greatest performances he’s ever given. There are so many seemingly conflicting things to play here – hope, regret, deception, honor, disgrace, warmth, danger, desperation –and he does it all with such nuance, taking what is a pretty mythical character and grounding him in palpable reality. Nichols has said he wrote the role with McConaughey in mind, and that’s easy to believe. Mud is an excellent showcase for McConaughey’s charisma and chops, and the film even contains a meta joke about being shirtless that is somehow weaved into the fabric of the character.

Like McConaughey’s performance, Mud has an organic quality to it that makes it easy to overlook as merely good at first. But then it lingers in the mind, growing in stature the more you ruminate on it. There’s so much to love here – the themes, the tone, the performances, the cinematography, the music, the iconography. This film is literally overflowing with riches. My favorite takeaway was the shootout toward the end of the picture, a set piece that overcomes its clichéd nature through sheer excellence in staging and visceral impact. When a coming-of-age drama succeeds on so many levels that it even contains my favorite action scene of the year – well, that’s pretty neat.

Dallas Buyers Club B, Mud A-

"Out of the Furnace" and "Ain't Them Bodies Saints" Squander Strengths by Overreaching

Despite it's drawbacks, there is a palpable emotional undercurrent to
Out of the Furnace, largely due to Bale's stellar performance.

I recently took in two extremely well-reviewed Casey Affleck movies – Out of the Furnace and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints – and my feelings about them are so similar that it made sense to throw them together in the same review.

Both are stripped-down entries that admirably avoid artifice and offer subtle, lived-in work from a talented assortment of actors. But both also take narratives that would normally make for fun, pulpy b-movies and turn them into somber, artsy-fartsy ballads straining for profundity.

I’m all about subverting genre conventions, and as a general rule I’m not against these sort of lyrical meditations – The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford does something similar, and it’s one of my favorite films (oddly enough, it also stars Affleck as a troubled outsider). But going this route can totally defang a story, turning what could be something worthwhile into a boring and opaque disappointment.

Of the two, Out of the Furnace is the superior film. It stars Christian Bale as a hard-working grunt at a steel mill who lands in jail after a fatal drunk driving accident. While incarcerated, he loses his girlfriend (Zoe Saldana) to a local cop (Forest Whitaker) and misses out on the remaining days of his sickly father. The only thing he retains is the love of his troubled brother (Affleck), a restless and emotionally damaged Iraqi War veteran who falls into a bare-knuckle brawling ring populated by some shady criminals, including a mostly honorable loan shark (Willem Dafoe) and a homicidal maniac (Woody Harrelson).

The film has a lot going for it. All the actors are in peak form, insinuating as much character and personality as is possible with such a bare bones approach. Bale shares a particularly good scene with Saldana that brutally exhibits what his mistake cost him, and his brotherly bond with Affleck is believably wrought.

There’s also a nicely modulated mournfulness hovering over this story of blue collar hardship, and it has a good thread at its core. I could easily imagine all of these components adding up to an excellent drama about a good man who did a bad thing and is now left to pick up the pieces. Instead, writer/director Scott Copper gets bogged down with exploring unsatisfying revenge elements. The film builds to its logical conclusion and ends with a boldly tantalizing final image, but it’s all just so limp.

Ain't Them Bodies Saints embraces a Malick-like aesthetic.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints fairs worse because the character dynamics aren’t as engrossing and the bad guys are woefully undefined. It focuses on Ruth (Rooney Mara) and Bob (Affleck), Bonnie and Clyde types who get involved in a robbery gone wrong and end up in a shootout during which Ruth shoots a cop (Ben Foster). Since Ruth is pregnant with their child, Bob takes the fall, claiming Ruth was an innocent victim in all of it.

Several years later, Ruth is on the straight and narrow, leading a simple life with her daughter Sylvie. When Bob breaks out of prison prepared to whisk his family away, Ruth has to consider what’s right for her daughter. There’s also the matter of that cop Ruth shot, who in investigating Bob’s jailbreak grows closer to her and Sylvie.

Once again, there are things to like – the setup is decent, the cinematography is breathtaking and the acting is top-notch – but writer/director David Lowery’s emphasis is put so emphatically on the picturesque landscape and poetic atmosphere that the whole thing plays as if on mute. Once Bob breaks out, he not only has to worry about the law, but also three shady goons out for blood, and it is never explained where these baddies came from. Some might see this ambiguity as strength, but it only works to add confusion.

These movies have their share of positives, but ultimately they are just too ponderous and intentionally vague to register as great films. I imagine a certain type of person would go gagga over their delicate sinew or something like that, but there’s just a lifelessness to them that left me wanting more. Out of the Furnace B, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints C+

Linklater Deepens Cinema’s Greatest Romance With Trilogy-Capping “Before Midnight”

After showcasing Vienna and Paris in the first two films, Before
Midnight takes place in Greece.

Every movie fan has more than a few films that their embarrassed to say they haven’t actually seen. For some reason, even though we all manage to catch up with our fair share of obvious duds like Baby Geniuses or Boat Trip, a multitude of true classics always fall through the cracks.

Despite my love for cinema and the crazy amount of time I spend on it, my list is still quite extensive. It’s probably no surprise that I haven’t seen many of the foreign classics by the likes of Godard, Traffaut, Bergman, and Fellini, but there are plenty of American films I’ve missed as well. For instance, although I’m a huge fan of the Godfather and have seen it about a dozen times, I’ve never actually seen Godfather, Part II. Meanwhile, it was only a few months ago that I finally caught up with The Silence of the Lambs, and I’m ashamed to admit I’ve yet to watch Apocalypse Now, A Clockwork Orange, Schindler’s List, Vertigo, and Lawrence of Arabia, among many other legendary films.

I try not to beat myself up over this, because, for whatever reason, there’s just so much more effort involved when you know you’re sitting down to watch a classic. Sometimes it’s just simpler to watch something of-the-moment, even mediocre drivel. Is We’re The Millers better than The Big Sleep? Most assuredly no, and yet I still spent two hours of my weekend watching Sudeikis and Aniston in lieu of Bogart and Bacall. It’s just the way things are.

I bring all this up as a preamble to my reaction to Before Midnight, which is the third in writer/director Richard Linklater’s series of talky films focused on soul mates Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy). Up until a few weeks ago, I’d never seen Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, the first two films in the trilogy. I was aware they existed and knew of the good buzz around them, and yet, I never went out of my way to seek them out. After all, how vital could two movies about star-crossed lovers bullshitting with each other during strolls through European locales possibly be?

After reading the raves for Midnight, I decided it was time to prioritize watching the first two films so that I could sit down for the third. Now, after having digested all three films, I’m fully confident that this trilogy belongs on the embarrassment list of any movie fan that has yet to see them. What Linklater and his actors (both of whom co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplays for the latter two entries) have accomplished with these films is outright mindboggling. Each one is great on its own, but as a whole, the trilogy places among the greatest cinematic triumphs I've ever seen.

Jesse and Celine are a long way from the idealized encounters they
shared in Before Sunrise (left) and Before Sunset (right).

For good reason, much of the emphasis on these films will be put on the romantic element and that makes sense. This is dubbed as one of the best romances in cinema history and with good reason – through three films Linklater has detailed the ongoing process that is love. Without giving too much away, it’s fair to say that Sunrise offers a dreamy evening between would-be lovers in Vienna, Sunset rekindles the passion after nine years apart, and Midnight catches up with the duo nine years later , during a critical juncture of what has become a long-term relationship.

There’s a universality to the whole journey – the idealism of a fresh connection, the realization that it wasn’t a fluke, that the love really was palpable and unique, and then, finally, the realism that sets in once you’re waist deep in a relationships, trying to keep love alive while maintaining your personal identity, making compromises and getting on one another’s nerves.

But these films detail not only the arc of a relationship, but the growth in these two people, and there’s something entirely relatable about the way the creative team so expertly captures the contradictions of the life stages in these three snapshots of life.

In his widely accepted Stages of Psychosocial Development, psychologist Erik Erikson* describes the psychosocial crisis for young adults (18 to 40) as love vs. intimacy, and the first two films fall in line with his teachings. There is a giddiness to the first film that echoes what it’s like being in your late teens and early 20s, a time when you’re fearless and exuberant but somehow simultaneously filled with all sorts of doubt. And the second highlights the mounting confidence that comes along midway through young adulthood that consistently clashes with a sort of restless desperation for things to finally come together.

*I’m not trying to be overly clinical here, but it’s very hard not to mention Erikson, especially considering Boyhood, Linklater’s latest film. Shot over the course of 12 years with the same four actors (Hawke included), the film is a literal coming of age story that chronicles the development of a boy from age 6 to 18. Clearly Linklater has a great interest in development and the passage of time, and it’s hard to imagine he hasn’t considered Erikson’s theory himself given that and how the theory perfectly dovetails with what he’s done in this series. If I ever were to get a chance to speak with the guy, you can bet I’d be sure to ask him about it.

Unlike the previous two entries in the series, Before Midnight features several other significant characters.

In Midnight, Jesse and Celine are no longer spring chickens. Erickson would place them firmly in adulthood (40 to 65), a time in which people begin wrestling with the psychosocial crisis of generativity vs. stagnation. It’s a time for people to focus on making a lasting mark in the world, and so, rightly, we find Jesse and Celine dealing with fears related to child rearing and career choices.

Overall, I think I like Sunset the best, mostly because it’s filmed in real-time, which lends immediacy to Jesse and Celine’s race to determine if this connection they’ve long idealized is a love worth changing their lives over. But all three films are absolutely fantastic in the way they capture the contradictions of life and love.

To focus specifically solely on the newest film, I greatly enjoy the ways in which it differentiates itself from its predecessors. Through the end of the second film, we had seen every moment shared between these two people, but now there’s nine years of added history – tender moments and strained concessions we haven’t witnessed – and that adds an extra weight to the proceedings.

Yes, Midnight ultimately focuses on a long and winding conversation in yet another European destination, but Linklater also opens up the narrative in the early going, including a revealing interaction between Jesse and his son from a previous relationship, as well as an extended dinner party sequence during which Jesse and Celine banter with several other couples. These two are no longer the sole voices on display, which is a clever way of indicating the mounting external factors these two are coping with now that fantasy has been replaced by reality. Things get darker in this third outing as the duo begins to feel boxed in by circumstance, and the narrative goes in some deeper and more complicated directions as a result.

Before closing, I have to mention that one of the very best things about these films is how wonderfully each one ends. All of them go out on satisfyingly poignant notes while somehow still leaving things provocatively unresolved. I’m not sure if Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy have the desire to keep returning to Jesse and Celine every nine years, but further entries would be more than welcome if they remain anywhere near as thought-provoking and engrossing as the first three have been. A