Before Midnight (2013)

Richard Linklater's third pass at Jesse and Céline arrives with a trilogy's worth of goodwill and almost none of the cultural apparatus that would mark it, in the current climate, as a document of social consciousness. Two white Western intellectuals talk for two hours on a Greek coast. The Greek players exist as vacation furniture, not as a casting statement, and the film has no interest in the categories that dominate contemporary discourse. Race goes unmentioned. So does sexuality, so does the body as a political site. The wind farm that Céline's NGO loses appears only to explain her professional despair, an environmental gesture that lasts about ninety seconds. We grade these things soberly. The cellar is bare.

The film does possess a genuine feminist current. Céline's dread of the government job, of a move to Chicago that would gut her career while Jesse chases his son, of the way motherhood has quietly annexed her identity: this is the spine of the thing. It is dramatized, never announced. Delpy and Hawke argue it out in a hotel room for twenty minutes, and the screenplay trusts us to reach the conclusion without a pamphlet.

The long dinner conversation and the hotel-room fight do drift, now and then, into thesis statements about the inherent difference between the sexes. The talk can feel like a seminar with wine. Maybe a fifth of the way to a lecture, no more. The argument stays rooted in two specific people with two specific grievances, which is the difference between drama and a memo. For a film built entirely of conversation, that restraint is the accomplishment. We file it accordingly: a minor annotation in a ledger that otherwise reads zero.