Midnight in ParisWoody Allen's whimsical valentine to the City of Light may be his most enjoyable film in years.Steven D. Greydanus | posted 6/24/2011 04:55AM
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Midnight in Paris
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MPAA rating: PG-13
(for some sexual references and smoking)
Genre: Comedy
Theater release:
June 10, 2011
by Sony Pictures Classics
Directed by: Woody Allen
Runtime: 1 hour 40 minutes
Cast: Owen Wilson (Gil), Rachel McAdams (Inez), Kathy Bates (Gert), Marion Cotillard (Adriana), Adrien Brody (Salvador)
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Returning from a trip to Paris sometime in the mid-20th century, a federal judge named Frank A. Picard told a friend named Charley Manes, "It was a wonderful trip. Paris is a grand place. But I wish I had made the trip 20 years ago."
"You mean, when Paris was Paris?" Manes asked.
"No," Picard replied, perhaps wistfully. "I mean when Picard was Picard."
When Paris was Paris. When Picard was Picard. Ah, the old days. It seems the present is always overshadowed by a remembrance of lost or faded glory, some golden age before which present realities are poor and unsatisfactory substitutes.
Woody Allen fans know it well. Sure, they'll admit, Allen cranks out a lot of unmemorable and even poor work nowadays—ah, but they remember when Allen was Allen. Every once in a while, perhaps, he comes out with a film that shows them he remembers, too.
Midnight in Paris is such a film. It's a nostalgic movie about nostalgia—nostalgia for when Paris was Paris, for one thing. Even if you've never been to the City of Light, even if phrases like "the Lost Generation" and "la Belle Époque" hold for you none of the magic they do for Allen, the film makes you feel their power for his onscreen alter ego, appealingly played by Owen Wilson. For that matter, even if you aren't an Allen fan—even if you aren't convinced Allen was ever Allen&mdashMidnight in Paris could almost make you nostalgic for the Allen that fans remember, or seem to.
Owen Wilson as Gil
Which Allen, though? There are almost as many Woody Allens as there are Allen films, but Midnight in Paris is a frothy, whimsical confection that harks back to fantasies like The Purple Rose of Cairo and Zelig—but in a sunnier, more relaxed mode, as if even Allen's bleak anxieties soften when night falls on the City of Light. The universe may be a cold, violent, meaningless place, Gil Pender (Wilson) muses—and yet there is Paris.
Credit the star, in part, whose distinctly non-East Coast persona caused Allen to rethink and rewrite his main character after Wilson was cast. As Gil, a Hollywood screenwriting hack (by his own admission) yearning to write a serious novel, Wilson is still recognizably "the Woody Allen character," like many Allen protagonists before him, but with his laid-back charm and unaffected enthusiasm he's a more likable than usual version, with fewer anxieties and more naiveté.
Gil, visiting Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her chilly, well-to-do parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy), is overwhelmed with the romance of the city (beautifully photographed by Darius Khondji) that he feels and they don't. "To know that Paris exists and anyone would choose to live anywhere else is a mystery to me," he muses, but even living in Paris wouldn't be enough for him. "I was born at the wrong time, into the wrong era," he complains. For him, "when Paris was Paris" means the days of expatriate writers and artists like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald; of Cole Porter and Josephine Baker; of Picasso, Dalí and Buñuel.
"All that's missing is the tuberculosis," sniggers Paul (Michael Sheen), an insufferable, preening academic whom Gil regards with the same testy unease that Allen did with Alan Alda in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Inez, though, fawns over Paul's erudition, and isn't embarrassed for Gil when Paul says things like "Gil's lament is nothing more than golden age thinking," as if he were diagnosing a case of psoriasis instead of cutting off a man's soul at the knees, if souls have knees.
Lea Seydoux as Gabrielle
It's a typically suffocating, Allenesque setup—but then, as unexpected as a delicious breeze on the muggiest urban summer night, a door opens for Gil. Where does it take him? It's not in the trailer, and even the cryptic end credits coyly avoid spoilers, but most reviews have no qualms about mentioning it, and it's probably not hard to guess.
At any rate, for Gil Paris comes alive at midnight. He gains admittance to a wonderful world of music and dancing, meets fascinating people and participates in exhilarating conversation. He is delighted when a no-nonsense writer named Gert (Kathy Bates) offers to look at his novel. Then he meets a lovely woman named Adriana (Marion Cotillard) who intrigues him despite, or perhaps because of, her complicated romantic history.
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