Before We Go (2014)

Before We Go arrives as a two-hander about strangers stranded in Manhattan overnight, and it conducts itself with the quiet propriety of a film that has no interest in the cultural conversation of its moment. Chris Evans directs himself and Alice Eve through Grand Central, a sweatshop, a wedding reception, and a psychic's parlor, and the whole enterprise carries the scent of a late-night conversation between two attractive people who have read no theory. The cast is white to a degree that feels almost archival, with a handful of Black performers drifting through the margins and no discernible design behind their placement. Nobody in this film is gay, or if they are, the screenplay has declined to mention it.

The picture is also innocent of race as a subject. Manhattan here is a backdrop of payphones and borrowed money, never a place where anyone thinks about who gets to stand where. There is no environmental conscience, no commentary on bodies or their acceptability, no neurodivergent character, and no history to revise, since the story takes place in a present tense that has nothing on its mind but a marriage in trouble. Brooke gets a genuine interior life as a woman deciding whether to return to a cheating husband, which is more than the genre usually offers, though the film never builds an argument on top of it. A sweatshop full of stolen handbags supplies a whiff of economic texture, and both leads are broke in ways that make for mild comedy, but the film has no thesis about money and no interest in acquiring one.

What remains is a gentle, meandering romance that dispenses life advice in dialogue and never once raises its voice to instruct us. It is agreeable, slight, and entirely untroubled by the questions that occupy more ambitious work. The classification is straightforward, and the evening passes.