[Watching Ethan Hawke in Before Sunset was probably, along with the R-train moment, which happened around that same time, the beginning of my realization that time was really passing, that this thing was really happening. Life began to show itself as more than a series of days, or movies, all in a row, which I might or might not attend. He was gaunt and slightly stooped, but it was his face—rough skin and sunken cheeks, with an angry, exclamatory furrow wedged like a hatchet blade between his eyes—that transfixed me. Some said he’d come through a divorce, and it took its toll; that that’s what life does to people. I’d heard about such things but never really seen it in action on the face of someone only a few years older than me. There was something awful and yet so marvelous, so real and poignant and right, about Ethan Hawke’s face, and about getting to see it in this beautiful meditation on what life does to people, a ten-years-in-the-making sequel to a film about people too young and smitten to be too concerned about what life might do to them. And what was life doing to me? I worry.]
From Michelle Orange’s sweet tribute essay to growing older and the films of 1999.
