These 5 Ethan Hawke Movies Are Masterpieces
I’ve watched Ethan Hawke become less certain over his whole career. That’s something most actors spend decades trying to avoid. He was never interested in aging into some polished movie-star monument. His men ramble, bluff, flirt badly, disappoint their children, discover that their convictions are shakier than advertised, and occasionally realize mid-conversation that the person across from them understands them better than they understand themselves. Hawke is fantastic when confidence starts leaking.
Maybe that is why his filmography feels unusually personal if you have watched it for years. Hawke keeps returning to that uncomfortable place where a person has to find out who he is after the self-description stops working. Let’s touch base on Ethan Hawke’s five finest films.
5 'Training Day' (2001)
Training Day follows rookie LAPD narcotics officer Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke) as he spends an evaluation day with decorated detective Alonzo Harris (Denzel Washington), gradually discovering that the experienced cop he hopes will advance his career runs his unit through corruption, intimidation, theft, and alliances with criminals. Jake begins the morning believing he needs to impress Alonzo. He ends it understanding that surviving him may require destroying the career he wanted in the first place.
Denzel Washington understandably owns the movie’s loudest memories, which makes Hawke’s job harder than it looks. Jake has to remain interesting while standing beside a human bonfire. Watch how his attitude changes after Alonzo forces him to smoke PCP at gunpoint. Early Jake keeps trying to explain away what he sees because admitting the truth would mean admitting his hero is rotten. The bathtub scene finally burns that denial out of him when gang members prepare to kill him and a wallet belonging to a girl he saved earlier becomes the absurd little accident that keeps him alive. After that, he stops seeking Alonzo’s approval. The final confrontation works because Jake has spent the entire day learning exactly what kind of man he refuses to become.
4 'Boyhood' (2014)
Boyhood follows Mason Evans Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) from childhood into his first day of college, using the same actors across twelve real years as he grows up between divorced parents, changing homes, stepfamilies, school, first love, heartbreak, and all the ordinary experiences that gradually become a life. That’s right. The film was literally filmed over a period of 12 years. Ethan Hawke is Mason Sr., the father who begins as the fun parent arriving in a Pontiac GTO with stories and opinions while Mason’s mother Olivia (Patricia Arquette) handles most of the actual responsibility.
What sneaks up on you is how much Mason Sr. changes without the movie stopping to announce a redemption arc. Early on, he lectures the kids, complains about their mother, and behaves like enthusiasm should count as parenting. Years later, he has remarried, had another child, traded the GTO, and learned how to be present in less glamorous ways. The scene where he talks to teenage Mason after a breakup is especially good because he cannot fix anything and finally knows enough not to pretend he can. Richard Linklater made the passing of time the movie’s famous experiment, but Hawke gives that experiment one of its loveliest results. You watch a man slowly become somebody his children can actually rely on.
3 'First Reformed' (2017)
First Reformed follows Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke), the pastor of a tiny historic church in upstate New York, whose already fragile life begins unraveling after a pregnant parishioner, Mary (Amanda Seyfried), asks him to counsel her husband, Michael (Philip Ettinger), an environmental activist convinced that bringing a child into a climate-ravaged future is morally indefensible. Paul Schrader wrote and directed the film, and he gives Hawke a man whose job requires him to provide spiritual certainty while his own certainty is collapsing.
Toller writes privately in a journal, drinks far too much, ignores frightening physical symptoms, and becomes increasingly consumed by Michael’s despair after their conversations take a terrible turn. Hawke barely raises the temperature externally. That restraint makes the cracks frightening. Watch him sit across from Michael discussing whether God can forgive humanity for destroying creation. Toller arrives as the counselor and leaves carrying part of the other man’s hopelessness. Later, the environmental crisis starts merging with his anger at the wealthy industrialist financing the church’s anniversary celebration, and faith begins turning into something more dangerous. The ending is astonishing. After all that intellectual despair, Schrader resolves the film through an act of almost desperate human contact. Hawke makes you believe Toller needed that interruption more than he needed another answer.
2 'Before Sunrise' (1995)
Before Sunrise follows American traveler Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and French student Céline (Julie Delpy) after they meet on a train in Europe, impulsively get off together in Vienna, and spend one night walking through the city knowing Jesse has a flight home the following morning. Richard Linklater wrote the film with Kim Krizan, and there is almost no conventional plot beyond two strangers deciding they would rather keep talking than say goodbye yet.
That simplicity exposes everything. Jesse is charming, but he also talks like a young man who has recently discovered several ideas and would very much like somebody attractive to hear them. Céline catches him when he performs. He catches her doing versions of the same thing. Their record-store listening-booth scene barely contains dialogue because suddenly the two people who have spent hours talking cannot comfortably look at each other while Kath Bloom plays between them. That nervousness tells you more than another romantic speech could. The genius of Hawke here is that Jesse’s confidence and insecurity arrive together. He wants this night to mean something and is already terrified that wanting it too badly might ruin it.
1 'Before Sunset' (2004)
Before Sunset reunites Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) in Paris nine years after their night in Vienna, with Jesse now a married novelist and father who has written a book inspired by their meeting, while Céline works in environmental advocacy and has built a life of her own. They have only the short window before Jesse is supposed to catch a flight, so the entire movie becomes a conversation both people know has been postponed for almost a decade.
This is where Ethan Hawke becomes devastating to me. Jesse initially hides behind jokes, book-tour charm, and the convenient fiction that seeing Céline again is simply nice. Then the conversation keeps stripping excuses away. They talk about why they missed their planned reunion, about Céline’s relationships, about Jesse’s marriage, about the life each imagined the other was living. Inside the car, Jesse finally admits how unhappy he is and starts describing dreams in which Céline is beside him, then touches her almost involuntarily before pulling his hand back. That tiny aborted gesture contains nine years. And then comes her apartment, Nina Simone, Céline dancing, Jesse sitting there knowing perfectly well what time his plane leaves. “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane.” “I know.” After two movies built out of talking, two words tell you everything.
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