(3 of 3)
To be 40 may not be a morass of tedium, but it isn't easy. "Is this film romantic?" Linklater asks. "Well, they eat together, they're still making each other laugh, they still seem to want to sleep together--at a certain point, that's as good as you're going to do." Linklater and his actors turn a victory that small into intense drama.
So intense, some people can't take it. At a screening the night before we spoke, Hawke tells me, one viewer--who happened to be going through a divorce--left the theater crying during the fight scene. Another viewer touched his wife's knee, and she pushed him away. "He thought, 'I'm really relating to this,' and she was like, 'I'm really relating to this too, and I'm not liking it,'" Hawke says. Linklater adds, "Before they see it, I ask friends, 'How are you doing?'"
Which is why I stayed home, nervously making dinner and bathing our 4-year-old, while Cassandra was at a screening of Before Midnight. She came home, pretended to be a dinosaur as Laszlo and I hid under his covers, and then we went upstairs when he went to sleep. She said the movie made her feel lucky she wasn't divorced or trying to be a mom who worked full time. She came home with no resentments, recriminations or regrets. I felt lucky too. Then I started talking.
Soon we were fighting about the kinds of things Jesse and Celine fight about, like who works more, whether she's insecure, whether I flirt too much. And whether we have to spend $5,000 to get our trees trimmed, and at some point, somehow, there was this: "If I did things like you want them done, people would say this house smells and it's disgusting and Joel's career must be falling apart and I don't want to be friends with these people."
It was the same fight all couples will have after seeing the movie. And I was so happy to be having it.