Cast: Owen Wilson, Marion Cottiard, Rachel McAdams
Directed by: Woody Allen
Written by: Woody Allen
Genre: Comedy

There’s a moment in Annie Hall when Alvy Singer (played by Woody Allen) and Annie are stuck in line for the theater behind a pretentious pontificator spewing his opinions on Fellini, Samuel Beckett, and Marshall McLuhan. Naturally, Alvy cannot let this stand – he might not be able to control the fate of his sex life, but he can stop his story dead in its tracks to correct a social injustice. Alvy breaks the fourth wall as he drags from off-screen Marshall McLuhan (in a cameo appearance) to dispel the boisterous blowhard. “You know nothing of my work! You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!” McLuhan implores. Alvy basks in the moment, addressing us directly “Boy, if life were only like this…”

Midnight in Paris is an extension of that one magical scene of cultural retribution from Annie Hall.

Owen Wilson plays Gil, a screenwriter from the West Coast who hopes to make the transition into authoring novels, which he finds far more rewarding and romantic. He and his fiancé (Rachel McAdams) take the opportunity to join her parents on a business trip to Paris where Gil longs for inspiration from the city’s cultural history. But he and his fiancé at odds – she wishes to spend her days and nights with a know-it-all couple from the States (Michael Sheen and Nina Arianda) and Gil wants to walk in the rain, visit cafés of his literary heroes, and bask in the richness of the city itself. Little does he know, that upon one of his lone midnight excusions, he’ll find himself walking the streets of Paris in the 1920s and befriending locals by the names of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, Gertrude Stein, and Salvadore Dalí.

Woody Allen has been making films for more than half a century now, and over his long career he’s created certain archetypal characters that best expound the themes he wishes to explore. Anyone acquainted with Allen’s work will be walk into Midnight in Paris met by familiar characters. Owen Wilson’s Gil is roughly the same character as Michael Caine’s Elliot in Hannah and Her Sisters, or Martin Landau’s Judah Rosenthal in Crimes and Misdemeanors, or any of the characters Woody Allen has played over the years. The surrounding characters are also recognizable: the overbearing family members, the social offenders, the flawed romantic interest. But since we already know these characters, Allen doesn’t have to spend precious time setting them up, which allows him to really explore this idea of always wanting to be in another time and place. Gil is a 21st Century screenwriter from California, but there’s a huge part of him that thinks he was born in the wrong time period, that he’d be much better suited, say, Paris circa 1925. However, as he is inexplicably granted his wish, he finds that no matter what time period, the residents will always long for the past and that nostalgia is inescapable.

It’s not integral that audiences are familiar with Allen’s previous work in order to immerse themselves in Midnight, however it helps speed up the process. It isn’t even necessary to be familiar with the rocky friendship of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemmingway, or the absurdist ideas of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, in order to appreciate Gil’s journey. Sure, these people are of a certain academia niché, however the themes – which are far more important in this film than the characters – are universal. In an odd way, Midnight in Paris is not dissimilar from Back to the Future, save for the whole time paradox thing. It’s about encountering the past in order to appreciate the present and future.

For a filmmaker who has been so ingrained in a certain time and place (New York, now) Woody Allen seems to have consistently pushed further and further away from what has initially defined him as a writer/director. Sure, his characters still have a debilitating fear of death, but over the last decade he has reflected on how that affects life. Utilizing his newfound penchant for the fantastical, Midnight in Paris is by far his most indulgent film, but not without self-awareness. Gil is whisked away, gratifyingly without explanation, ninety years in the past where he meets the artistic personalities that have made up numerous references in Allen’s repertoire of films. It’s no coincidence that Allen is calling himself out by saying, “look, even if I could live in a time with the people who influenced me, I’d still be unhappy.” However pessimistic that message may be, he doesn’t allow his character to be deterred. This is a movie after all, a place where the characters can come to conclusions that we might not necessarily be able to in reality, and Gil uses his experience to push forward in a positive direction.

The best quality of Midnight in Paris is its whimsy. It is a light and breezy watch which captures the delight of a stroll through Jadin du Luxembourg, or sipping on a café latte at Les Deux Magots. This isn’t Gershwin’s New York, and though the opening mirrors Allen’s Manhattan, it comes with a wholly different tone. He sets out to capture the picturesque air of Paris, not the cosmopolitan beauty of New York, and it translates into his most delightful film to date.

USA, Spain. 94 minutes. Rated PG-13.

Click here to read DVD review.

• «Previous Post
• Next Post »

---