3 ½ stars (out of four)
Woody Allen loves Paris. And the Parisians love him right back. That he has taken this long to shoot a film there is something of a wonder. Recently, however, Woody Allen’s films have departed from his hometown of Manhattan and the auteur so beloved by Europeans has gone on something of a world tour of the major European cities.
There was London in the devastatingly understated noir Match Point and Barcelona in the sizzling romantic comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona. There were other lesser films in between and since those but as any Woody Allen fan will tell you (myself included), when a filmmaker of this magnitude still produces a movie a year – this is his 41st since his debut in 1966 – we are willing to overlook the mediocre efforts in favor of the really good ones.
Midnight in Paris falls perhaps just a shade below the two aforementioned films, standouts of latter-day Woody Allen. This is a comic fantasy akin to the director’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, where a movie star walks off screen and falls in love with a loyal moviegoer. The plot of Midnight in Paris was a surprise to me (I avoided the early reviews from Cannes) and some critics have made a point of not spoiling its story. I am not sure the secrecy is necessary; the film is a delight whether you know what it’s about or not. Still, those looking to see the film fresh can stop here and continue reading after seeing it.
The film opens with Gil (Owen Wilson), a somewhat neurotic Hollywood screenwriter looking to restart his career as a literary novelist, professing his love of Paris in the rain. He would give anything to live in Paris in the Twenties, when the city was a cultural hub of bohemian artists and writers. His fiancé Inez (Rachel McAdams) is not as enthused. There is nothing fun about getting wet, she says. The two are accompanying her parents on a business trip in the City of Light when they bump into an old friend of Inez’s, Paul (Michael Sheen), an insufferably stuffy scholar who is in town to give a lecture on Monet.
Gil needs to get away. Alone, he goes on a late night drunken stroll down the cobblestone streets and, of course, gets lost. At the stroke of midnight, a car stops for him and some lavishly dressed Parisians invite him to a party.
And what a party it is. Elegant partygoers smoke from cigarette holders. There is a pianist playing Cole Porter songs. Gil is in heaven. But when a fellow American, Zelda, introduces him to her husband, Scott Fitzgerald, Gil realizes where he is. Those cigarette holders are not nostalgic kitsch – they’re the real deal. That’s not a well-trained impersonator on the piano – it’s Cole Porter. Somehow Gil has been transported back to Paris in the Golden Age. But just when he’s been invited to Gertrude Stein’s place for a critique of his novel, he’s back in the twenty-first century.
From here, the movie whisks us back and forth between past and present-day Paris. In addition to the Fitzgeralds (played by Alison Pill and Tom Hiddleston), we meet comic caricatures of all the big names that drifted in and out of Parisian cafés and bars in the Twenties including Hemingway (the exceptionally funny Corey Stoll), Stein (Kathy Bates), Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo), Dali (Adrien Brody) and more.
Woody Allen has never been shy about expressing his opinions in his films and he is not subtle in showing his adoration for Paris in both eras. Allen, now 75, has recently taken to casting younger actors to play the parts he might have once written for himself. Owen Wilson is given the Woody Allen shtick here and the choice is a perfect fit. Wilson knows just how to deliver those stammering witticisms without ever coming across as imitating his director. McAdams fulfills the role of Gil’s disenchanted wife, a familiar character in Allen films, and Sheen is excellent as the biting academic. The rest of Allen’s typically strong supporting cast includes the French First Lady Carla Bruni as a museum tour guide and Marion Cotillard as a beauty from the past.
Midnight in Paris is a delightful movie that serves as a love letter to the city and its culture but also provides some wonderful insight late in the film into the ways in which we romanticize and idealize the past. This is probably not the film that will convert a non-fan of Allen (for that I would recommend Match Point and Barcelona or earlier classics such as Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors) but it reaffirms my own love of Allen as all his best films do. It’s no wonder the Parisians love him.
- Steve Avigliano, 6/23/11
- Steve Avigliano, 6/23/11
omg we saw this 1 toooo
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