Writer-director Alex Holdridge is a young veteran of All The Best Festivals, having scored armfuls of awards at Austin and SXSW with his first two features, Wrong Numbers and Sexless. This film is Mr. Holdridge’s third Nietzschean adventure in lo-fi filmmaking, and the first to make the leap from festival crowd-pleaser to actual crowd-pleaser. You know, for normal people.
A freewheeling slacker romance converging on One Magical Evening in suburban LA, watching Midnight’s neat narrative arc, it is impossible not to recall the similarly Aristotelian parsimony of Before Sunrise. Our hero, however, is far closer to a bawdy Kevin Smith layabout than Ethan Hawke’s melancholic swain. As the film opens, floppy-haired twenty-something Wilson (Scott McNairy) has nothing to his name but a screenplay stuck in development hell. Caught by his flatmate masturbating over photoshopped pictures of the latter’s girlfriend, Wilson opts for desperate measures to end his six-year drought as a singleton. Through an ad on Craigslist, he lands a New Year’s Eve date with unemployed starlet Vivian (Sara Simmonds). A mouthy drama queen combining a touch of Annie Hall and a dash of Something Wild’s Audrey Hankle, Vivian provides Wilson with an unforgettable evening of dysfunction and threats from a psychotic ex-boyfriend.
Sparks fly just the same.
Though the youths are too callow, too SoCal to quite capture the imagination like Delpy and Hawke, there is plenty in Midnight to cheer about. Indeed, beautiful budget cinematography (from DOP Robert Murphy) and sparkling verbal battles – well done, Mr. McNairy and Ms. Simmonds – make this the hippest date movie since Ai No Corrida.