Ethan Hawke

absentee

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I had never given much thought to the experience of not knowing one of my parents. Nor had I really given a great deal of thought to the myriad ways and expressions of not being a part of one’s child’s life.

I spent the holidays with individuals (half-siblings) who share the same mother but different fathers – and neither of them had much contact with or knowledge of their fathers. They met them only when they were older, and for whatever reason have never expressed much curiosity about who these fathers were. During childhood and adolescence, the not knowing appeared to be more tantalizing than knowing for sure. They could imagine that their fathers were anything they wanted them to be – important, busy, wealthy, foreign – any kind of character and lifestyle. Any kind of fantasy life that kept them away.

In reality, meeting these absent fathers made whatever illusions they may have had disappear. But it was not as though they had held onto or truly believed in the many other possibilities they had concocted. It was better to live the lives they had and ignore the reality, even after being confronted by it.

Pop culture is full of these parentless (many fatherless, in fact) stories, in which the father figure’s absence is treated as important but not central. In stories like Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo, the main characters are depicted as living with a ne’er-do-well alcoholic mother and no mention is made of the father. The working class Glaswegian experience is peppered with these kinds of stories – struggling, often strong, single mothers and absent (and barely mentioned) fathers. It’s not clear from the stoic ways characters front whether they miss their fathers or the experience of having known a father.

“They say you can’t miss something you never had,” a little girl, Mad, states, in the story Lessons in Chemistry (which is, incidentally a subtle advertisement for the power of the public library and librarians), referring to her deceased father. She goes on to say that this cannot be true. She never knew her father at all – he was killed before her mother even knew she was pregnant. It is an entirely different kind of absence… but does the way of absence matter? What prompts the longing, the curiosity in some… while others live as though the presence of a father has never mattered?

In the now-ended Reservation Dogs, most of the main characters have absent fathers, and some are without parents at all. Throughout the series, the character Bear pins his hopes on his shiftless, absent father and eventually comes to terms with the nature of the relationship (or lack thereof). As the series ends, a poignant episode follows the character Elora as she seeks out her father for the first time. She had never given his existence much thought until she decides to go to college and needs to complete financial aid forms using the information of her parents. The meeting between father and daughter is perfunctory at first, yet filled with a tense awkwardness. Elora plays tough and indifferent, and her biological father (Ethan Hawke) grasps for the right words to say. Eventually Elora softens and agrees to meet her half-siblings. The shift in their dynamic is small and incremental and depicted delicately through light-touch dialogue, silences, and subtle facial expressions.

For those of us who never experienced such an absence, it would be hard to understand what someone who never had a father at all might feel. One imagines emptiness, a longing or even an idle curiosity, but frequently it seems as though whatever is felt, it’s buried – or out of sight, out of mind – until something triggers the questions. Even if you don’t miss someone or something you never had, surely you would be curious about it?

Why I Changed My Mind: Julie Delpy

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Julie Delpy is, for lack of a better term, a real woman. A woman of many talents, not afraid to be herself, not afraid to be quirky. And not even afraid to be a bitch. When she was younger, it was hard to see things like Europa Europa, her guest arc on the TV hit ER or Trois Couleurs: Blanc and see her as anything but bitchy – her roles were sort of icy or manipulative in ways that made it hard to see her in any other light. And things like Before Sunrise with the generally overrated Ethan Hawke did not lend any charm – a favorite “romance” flick for Gen Xers, Before Sunrise, never appealed to me (like most Gen X pop-culture goalposts and anthems, such as Reality Bites – also with Hawke or Singles, which still does not make sense to me).

The subsequent nine-year intervals between sequels to Before Sunrise, though, have made the films Before Sunset and Before Midnight quite compelling – and I think this is all down to Delpy. Since I don’t get and have never gotten the Ethan Hawke thing (somehow he was the one in Dead Poet’s Society who was singled out for attention, when it was Robert Sean Leonard‘s passionate and tragic turn as Neil that got my attention. Or the passionate, do-anything-for-the-girl classic guy-with-crush performance of Josh Charles as Knox Overstreet. What did Ethan Hawke do in that movie that was so remarkable except defy authority and be the first to jump up on a desk at the end? Yet Ethan Hawke has been the movie star and these others have been “television actors” in popular and well-respected shows, such as House and The Good Wife (and no, I don’t mean that in the snide way Warden Gentles did in Arrested Development), I can only imagine that the load is carried in large part by Delpy.

After the aforementioned “cold” roles in her early career, followed by some missteps like Killing Zoe and An American Werewolf in Paris, I think I could be forgiven my rush to harsh judgment. None of this is to say that her talents went unrecognized – I never watched these films and believed she lacked talent or was just playing variations of herself. I just wondered how it was that she always played this aloof or sometimes misguided character (thinking here of her “Leni” in Europa Europa – she was passionate all right, but the passion was wholly devoted to producing children for Hitler’s “pure Germany”. Perhaps in hindsight I can applaud Delpy’s believability because that role had to have been hard to pull off).

My re-evaluation of Delpy began when I saw Before Sunset. Yeah, I know – I hated Before Sunrise but still had enough curiosity to see where Jesse and Celine (the characters) ended up. I like to torture myself this way, watching things I don’t like, listening to music I don’t like – perhaps just to remind me that there are other, much more beautiful things to watch and hear in the world. But Before Sunset surprised me. Later I saw Delpy in other roles but really decided I liked her after seeing Two Days in Paris (and later, the even funnier Two Days in New York). (I also enjoyed the on-screen keying of cars that Delpy’s father engages in – dismissing it as “normal French behavior” – exactly what I have been trying to tell everyone who isn’t French!) Her performances were subdued and grounded in reality – and that transformed the way I saw her and interpreted her roles.

The change in my opinion also came about because I liked learning that Delpy is so active behind the camera as a writer and director – I love the idea that someone creates the stories they want to see, or they want to appear in. I have read a few interviews where Delpy has kind of downplayed the uniqueness of being a female director, particularly because France actually has quite a number of well-respected, well-known women directors. But this is rather an anomaly in the cinematic world. Not every country has a Claire Denis, an Agnès Jaoui, a Catherine Breillat, a Josiane Balasko, a Mia Hansen-Løve and the countless other women who direct films in France. Delpy can, I hope, forgive the rest of the cinema-loving world for admiring the rarity of her multitasking, multitalented jack-of-all-trades approach to her artistic career.

My feelings should not be overly influenced by what I read or the person Delpy is or appears to be – but the truth is, reading about her own feelings of insecurity or feeling like “a cow” after her child was born – and seeing how she actually looks like a real woman – a stunningly beautiful and stunningly natural woman – imbues her performances with a kind of earthy reality that is not easily found, felt or seen elsewhere. I don’t often have commentary on how actors and actresses look. They are resoundingly “perfect” and put together most of the time, and the especially beautiful and polished are slathered in accolades if they do anything that might make them seem anything less than perfect. It’s like becoming a regular or slightly unattractive person makes a beautiful person an automatic consideration for acting awards. Is that really the measure of how well someone acts? How much vanity they are willing to give up – temporarily, note – to alter their appearance?

Not the point. The point is that Delpy actually looks and sounds the part (“the part” being a woman in her 30s/early 40s). Contributing to the scripts for both Before Sunset and Before Midnight, the conversation – content and pace – throughout feels almost dull at times but in a refreshing and good way. Why? Because that’s how real conversation is. Sometimes it digs into emotion, sometimes it digs into feelings and insecurities and vulnerabilities, sometimes it is witty, sometimes it is just the kind of petty shit that people hurl at each other in moments of weakness, despair, anger. It’s not perfect – but in that way, it’s perfect. A perfect reflection of everyday life. In Before Midnight, Delpy especially – but really the whole cast (which is mostly Delpy and Hawke) – captures, with almost no action – the up-and-down nature of a relationship. Before Sunrise was lauded for supposedly capturing this, but it’s easy to have two young, idealistic adults meet and talk all night and have it be the most romantic night of their lives. Before Midnight, though, is entirely another level of “romantic” because it had to capture two people who had actually idealized each other when they were young – it showed the reality of what happens if someone pursues the “what might have been” or “the one who got away”. It isn’t going to be ideal. If anything, the dialogue and performances convey perfectly the fragility of relationships. All the things unsaid, the resentment, the misinterpretations – and the question of whether love is ever really enough.