by Robert Bouffard
I love to engage with media that challenges my beliefs. It makes me think deeply when a film or television show presents themes or characters who are opposed to my worldview. I like to understand where other people are coming from. Understanding and engaging others’ viewpoints are essential to forming your own.
I’ve come to this conclusion largely because I grew up in an atmosphere that discouraged this oppositional engagement. The suggested way of handling this was to shelter your mind and insist that you were right, which is counterproductive.
Nowadays, I get excited when I watch a movie and love it, only to realize it has an oppositional viewpoint to another movie I love. It just serves to materialize the sort of debate and cultivation of thought that I enjoy so much. These instances show me that contrasting ideas can coexist and each thrive, which is the kind of world I strive for.
So join me as I examine two movies that send opposite messages, but which I still love just the same.
Both movies that I have chosen here explore a number of different themes. But I’m boiling them each down to how they deal with one idea in particular: finding meaning outside your occupation.
I enjoy pairings where you would never expect the two movies to be put together. At face value, Soul and Before Midnight are nothing alike. One is an animated Pixar movie that heavily features “The Great Beyond,” physical manifestations of souls, and a large chunk of time where a man is stuck in a cat’s body and the other is roughly 98% people talking. The films’ messages aren’t necessarily diametrically opposed, but they’re still tackling similar issues while coming to different conclusions.
Let’s start with Before Midnight. This Richard Linklater-directed film is the third of three Before movies starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. The first, Before Sunrise, was released in 1995 and plays out over the course of one night as Jesse and Celine (Hawke and Delpy, respectively) meet on a train, fall in love, and then have to say goodbye to each other. The ambiguous ending leaves the audience wondering about the ultimate fate of their relationship. Before Sunset, the 2004 sequel, shows the characters finally reuniting nine years later as almost completely different people. After spending the whole day together this time, the movie has a less ambiguous ending, but still doesn’t make everything perfectly clear. The characters are physically together, but we don’t know how long that will last.
Enter, Before Midnight. The 2013 movie came out another nine years after its predecessor and finds its leads – you guessed it – another nine years older. Except this time, it’s different. Jesse and Celine are no longer meeting up for the first time in years. This time, they’ve been together for the past nine years. They live in Europe with their twin daughters and Jesse has just sent his teenage son Hank on a plane back to America to be with his ex-wife after he spent the summer with them.
This is where the conflict of the film starts. Jesse begins to express his anxieties about Hank being on a completely different continent. He feels like he’s missing out on an important time in Hank’s life and throws out the idea of the couple moving back to America to be near Hank. But Celine has a job offer to work in the French government, which is a job she’s been working towards.
Thus, the couple get into a heated argument about the merits of staying in Europe for Celine’s job and for their daughters versus moving to America where Jesse can write and spend the much-needed time with Hank. Celine already feels like her life and identity begin and end as a mother. She spends all her time cleaning up and taking care of the kids and she wants to be able to have some sort of life outside the kids.
I think there’s such an interesting tension that comes up here. Celine expressing her feelings about wanting to do more outside of her motherhood comes in such a raw manner that you don’t often see in movies. This movie is obviously just a small snippet of her whole life, but it doesn’t seem like she spends her time being in love with life or appreciating the position she’s in. Rather, she’s harboring a lot of resentment towards Jesse, who gets to be a writer as a career and works when he’s struck with inspiration. She doesn’t get that kind of luxury. She wants to go out and make something more of herself and bring good into the world. It’s notable, though, that the avenue which she’s choosing to do so is through a professional career. (It’s also worth noting that the Before films never pass a value judgement on their ideas. They’re simply thrown out for the viewer to digest and think about.)
This is quite similar to Joe Gardner from Soul. Joe is a part time middle school band teacher with an ultimate goal of becoming a professional pianist. He doesn’t consider teaching to be his long-term career. It’s more of a stopgap before he can ultimately become a successful and famous pianist. So when he’s offered a chance to play with the famous jazz musician Dorothea Williams, he feels like this is his big break. After all, he thinks, “I was born to play…”
But during his ecstatic walk home after getting the call, Joe falls down a manhole and finds himself on the way to the “Great Beyond.” Once in the Great Beyond, Joe is mistaken for a new soul mentor and is paired with 22, or the twenty-second soul ever. 22 is a cynical soul who doesn’t see what the big deal is about going to earth and living life as a human. She thinks she already knows everything about the world and doesn’t want to have to go experience it.
Basically, in the next chunk of the movie, hijinks ensue. Joe and 22 find themselves back on earth with 22 in Joe’s body and Joe in the body of the aforementioned cat. But it’s significant for 22 because she finally begins to actually experience life for the first time instead of just having knowledge about it from a distance. She talks to people, tastes food, hears music, and experiences nature, all things she never would have understood unless she was actually on earth.
22, for the first time, finds real meaning and value in life because she goes out and experiences what it has to offer. In so doing, Joe learns that there’s more to life than the one thing you’re passionate about and which you put the majority of your effort into. For most of the movies, he placed his value in what he did and not in life itself. Even after he finally performs with Dorothea Williams, he still has an empty feeling and wonders what’s next. He realizes, then, that he won’t find ultimate fulfillment in what he does, but from how he lives.
I can’t ever see myself feeling unfulfilled in life because of unrealized professional goals, the way Celine heavily alludes to. That’s not to say I don’t have professional goals, because I do. It’s more that there is so much more to life than an occupation or profession. I don’t want to derive my worth from what I do, but rather from how I live my life every day. And I know this isn’t the main point of the Before trilogy, but it’s a huge point in Before Midnight. Besides, movies have more than one message and I’m focusing on just one from each of these two.
There’s a very good chance that I only have this outlook because I’m in my mid-twenties while the characters in Before Midnight are in their forties. I think each of the Before movies will likely hit best for the audience member who is closest in age to the characters. But I will still always find myself being drawn back to Joe’s ultimate epiphany. I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life, but I do know that I’m going to live every minute of it.