“BEFORE MIDNIGHT” My rating: B (Now showing at the Rio)
109 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Think of “Before Midnight” as a romantic bouquet laced with poison ivy.
It is, of course, the third chapter of the long-running exploration of love — from director Richard Linklater and actors Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy — that began with “Before Sunrise” in 1995 and continued with “Before Sunset” in 2004.
Once again Hawke and Delpy reprise their roles of Jesse and Celine. In the first film, which took place overnight in Vienna, the vacationing young American and the French girl met, walked the city, and had a fling (in a park, as I recall) before parting with the rising of the sun.
The second film, taking place a decade later in Paris, found them both in relationships but thrown together once again when Celine attends a reading of Jesse’s novel…a novel inspired by their long-ago night together. They wander Paris until it is time for Jesse to head to the airport…only to find their love is rekindled in what had to be one of the sexiest moments in movie history.
“Before Midnight” finds Jesse and Celine now a couple (though unmarried). It unfolds on a picturesque Greek Isle where they are vacationing with Jesse’s 13-year-old son (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick) and their twin daughters (Jennifer and Charlotte Prior).
Anyone who’s gone on a family vacation with young children could predict that the eroticism-charged romance of the first two films would be supplanted by a humdrum reality of kids and responsibility. What you might not anticipate is that before it’s over we’ll be questioning whether Jesse and Celine are going to make it as a couple.
Butler's Cinema Scene 