Starring: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates and about a million other people because it’s a Woody Allen movie
Directed By: Woody Allen
Written By: Woody Allen
Produced By: Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum and Jaume Roures
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: Approximately 100 minutes
Website: sonyclassics.com/midnightinparis
Budget: $30 million
Genre: Comedy
Release Date: June 3, 2011
“Nostalgia is denial,” muses Paul (Michael Sheen), a blowhard who fancies himself an intellectual. “Denial of the terrible present.” It’s meant as an admonishment to Gil (Owen Wilson), a glum screenwriter on holiday in Paris with his fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams). The blowhard may have a point, at least in Gil’s case. He’s looking to get out of the script doctoring business and finally write the Great American Novel, but his insecurity and frustration makes him pine for the days of his literary idols – Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein. Being in Paris doesn’t help matters, knowing that he’s in the same city that inspired his artistic idols to write and paint in the 1920s.
In Midnight in Paris, writer-director Woody Allen’s latest comedy, Gil is enraptured with this mythic notion of Paris-as-muse, yearning for a seemingly more simplistic time when art for art’s sake was the norm and the better because of it. Idly walking through the streets after a night of drinking, Gil is picked up by a mysterious, anachronistic car. Its passengers don’t speak his language, but Gil is whisked along on a night of magical revelry, a night where he can finally meet his heroes face to face and deny his terrible present by drinking with Hemingway and partying with Picasso. While cavorting with the creative idols of the past, Gil meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a young costume designer and art groupie whom he finds a shiny alternative to the demanding Inez and her disapproving family. An inexplicable visitor to a time long past, Gil looks to his heroes for inspiration and finds his idealization of the past may not be everything he had dreamed.
How Gil is able to traverse the barrier between the past and the present isn’t really touched upon, and is besides the point. Midnight in Paris is about the glories and pitfalls of sentimentality, and how that can both redeem and destroy the creative mind. It covers a lot of familiar thematic ground for Woody Allen, most notably Deconstructing Harry, where Allen himself claimed, in complement to Paul’s dismissal of nostalgia, “Tradition is the illusion of permanence.” The past has clearly been on the 75-year-old Allen’s mind, and it’s no stretch to say that Gil, a role Allen would have played himself as a younger neurotic, is more of the author wrestling with his own creative and personal demons.
Allen has been churning out a movie a year for quite a while now, and by sheer volume there have been as many hits as misses, particularly in the latter half of his career. It seems like every other movie is “Woody Allen’s best in years,” and no matter how long it’s been, it’s usually true.
Wilson plays Gil like Woody… if Woody were a stoner from Texas. While initially off-putting, it seems weirdly appropriate for Wilson to bring his own self-deprecating angst to the usual Woody Allen whines and tics. If you weren’t a fan of Kenneth Branagh’s eerie Woody impression in Celebrity, you’re just as unlikely to be swayed by Wilson’s turn here as “the Woody Allen character” (a jittery creative type with fidelity issues? Get out!). No matter how selfish or whiny Gil gets, however, Wilson does just enough to keep him likeable.
The supporting cast of past icons and Gil’s incredulous modern family is well-acted, if mostly two-dimensional. Allen’s not above gimmick casting (Carla Bruni, the First Lady of France, has a small role) or taking a couple of easy swipes at the Tea Party movement, but his tendency to ask the questions and answer them with a tone of resigned amusement serves the restless character of Gil well. Gil’s only a means to an end, anyway. He’s a vehicle for the director to interact with his heroes: all of the above mentioned, plus Dali, Eliot, Luis Bunuel, and a gaggle of others. Midnight in Paris deals more with the legends of these figures than their reality.
Every once in a great while, a human failing shines through, and that’s Allen dealing with the reality of living, no matter what age you live in: we’re all only people, in the end, with our own problems and our own regrets, and what can we do but try to deal with everything as best we can? The movie, much like the figures it celebrates, can be pretentious, coy, and self-important, but also full of tremendous wit and insight into the creative mind. Midnight in Paris is essentially an imagined dialogue between Allen and his heroes, and it’s fascinating to watch it all play out against a backdrop as understandably bewitching as the fantasy of the City of Lights.
3.5 Stars
