Every nine years, director Richard Linklater has done a film about Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy):  Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and this year Before Midnight, which I finally saw this weekend.  The trilogy (so far) traces the couple from their first accidental meeting on a train and the hours that followed to this film, which records their last night of a six-week holiday at the home of a famous British writer on the southern tip of the Peloponnese.  Jesse has a son from an extremely unhappy marriage who leaves to return to his mother in Chicago.  Together, Jesse and Céline have twin daughters.  The three films are about speech; nothing "happens" in the movies.  Rather, we listen to the two main characters (there is a scene in this film with the novelist host and some Greek guests, but it's just a brief interlude, and it too is all talk) as they express their thoughts from the most trivial to the most serious, though how seriously we take these latter observations is up to us.

The mood of this film is much less buoyant than the earlier two.  Indeed, for the first time, the endless talk becomes exhausting, though that feeling is intentional as Delpy's character particularly keeps circling back to the same themes.  How patient Jesse is to continue to listen and to try to please her.  Céline has coarsened in the nine years since we've seen last seen her.  Her body and her legs have thickened, and her attitude is heavier and less playful.  Jesse hasn't changed as much, and his worries, especially about his separation from his son, are more conventional.  He is now the stable one with glints of silliness still making him appealing--to us and to Céline.  It's Delpy's movie, for she provides the emotional swings to Jesse's ballast.  At the end, though Céline has tried to leave three times, she finally can't resist--for now at least--Jesse's winsome devotion.  Nine years from now, if there's a fourth installment, the characters will have just turned fifty.  All that's predictable is that they'll still be talking.

Meanwhile, James Franco has adapted William Faulkner's 1930 novel As I Lay Dying.  The novel is short by Faulkner standards, but it plays incessantly with point of view, as each section is a first-person narrative by one of the characters.  Some characters have many sections; Addie, the dead matriarch who is getting revenge on her husband by making the family carry her body through fire and flood to the town where she was born, has only one.  Midway through the novel, though she has been dead since the beginning, Addie speaks.  In addition to the playing with narrative, Faulkner also makes ample use of the grotesque: Vardaman, the youngest son, fearing his mother can't breathe in the coffin, drills air holes into it--and into his mother's face.  Another son breaks his leg as they transport the coffin, and they fix it by putting cement around it with nothing between the cement and the skin. 

Faulkner is, of course, notoriously difficult to try to film, and As I Lay Dying entails its share of complications.  The most ludicrous film version of a Faulkner novel is a 1959 version of one of Faulkner's greatest novels, The Sound and the Fury (Franco is also filming this) in which there is not one moment that isn't laughable and in perhaps revealing Hollywood fashion, the greediest and most self-centered character from the novel, Jason IV, is made the hero.  The only truly successful adaptation of a Faulkner novel, I think, is the Clarence Brown version of Intruder in the Dust (1949) with Juano Herdandez giving a great performance as the intractable Lucas Beauchamp.   Franco's As I Lay Dying has received mixed reviews, especially for his use of voice overs and split screens to approximate Faulkner's shifting points of view.  The cliché is that great novels rarely make good films.  The unity of form and content is too tight; the author's style and perspective are too distinct.  It doesn't sound as if Franco has given the lie to that analysis, but I'm looking forward to his attempt, which is clearly made out of love for Faulkner and his novel.