Ethan Hawke

Last week my stars aligned when Jian Ghomeshi interviewed Ethan Hawke on Q. For those of you not in Canada, or not in the CBC loop, Q is an arts and entertainment show on CBC radio weekday mornings. My day is not complete unless I get in my car to drive to work and listen to Jian’s Letter of The Day. Sometimes I’m late, I miss the introduction, and then spend my drive trying to figure out who Jian is talking to.

So Ethan Hawke, I’m a little worried that if I ever meet him, which I know is unlikely, I’ll only be able to giggle and gawk.  I’m usually not much of a Hollywood fan, but I love the Before Sunset trilogy. I’m just a bit younger than Hawke and I saw the first film Before Sunrise when I was travelling in Eastern Europe in my twenties in 1995. Two young people, Jessie and Celine, meet on a train and decide to spend the day together in Vienna. There they wander, talk and fall in love. It’s very romantic.

I had almost forgotten about Jesse and Celine when Before Sunset came out in 2004. It was such a treat to see those characters a few years older and more mature. It was of course also thrilling to think they were still interested in each other. In the film, Jesse has written a book about the day he spent with Celine years before. Celine comes to his reading, this time in Paris, and they spend the day talking  and walking in Paris.



Before Midnight, the third and most recent film, was  again an unanticipated surprise.  Set in Greece, Jesse and Celine are now married with twins and living in Paris, but their lives are not smooth. Jesse has a son from his first marriage he would like to spend more time with in the US which Celine sees as a threat.

Richard Linklater’s films are such a treat because of how he shows mature adult relationships, along with all their messiness on film. Jessie and Celine grapple with difficult ex-wives, growing children, job angst as well as marital pains. Despite the fact that Celine is extremely crazy in this movie, “the Mayor of Crazy Town” as Jesse calls her, I couldn’t help feeling how refreshing it was to see a woman in her forties struggle with work, motherhood, and marriage. Hollywood take note, this is real life for women, and it makes excellent film.

Hawke said something similar on Q yesterday. He said, “I’m so hungry to see a real woman on stage, someone who works and has relationships and is a good parent and a bad parent.” He was talking about Patricia Arquette’s character in Boyhood, Linklater’s other amazing film that came out this year. Shot over twelve years, it chronicles the life of a boy, Mason from six years old to his first day of college. Boyhood is not a plot-driven movie, nor does it have a soaring climax. It’s episodic, the way life is, yet it still tells a story of one boy’s life. Hawke says Linklater told him it was the chance to use time as clay to build a character. I love that line.

For as much as Mason changes through the stages of childhood, I was more interested in the development of the parents. Ethan Hawke’s father character changes from a kind of dopey carefree, mostly absent parent, to a person who has attained some gravitas. Similarly, Arquette’s character, whose has a tougher love life finds herself more at a loss as she faces life alone when her children leave for college. I found myself thinking about this film the way I think about people I know for days after I saw the film.

In case Hawke hasn’t done enough this year, he also has two other films: a documentary on Seymour Bernstein called Seymour, an Introduction. Bernstein is a piano prodigy turned music teacher who decided to stop playing at age fifty because of ongoing problems with nerves and self-doubt, something Hawke says he also struggles with.

Hawke also stars in Good Kill, about a former fighter pilot who flies unmanned drones from Nevada. Hawke’s character grapples with the moral implications of killing people in such an emotionless way.

I can’t wait to see both films.