06/21/2011
Review by David Anthony
In Midnight in Paris, writer and director Woody Allen has provided an erudite feel good film. Wannabe writer Owen Wilson as Gil and new wife Inez played by Rachel McAdams) are an American couple visiting Paris, a place of which they have dreamed. Hovering close by are the Inez’s parents, who regard Gil and what they see as his authorial delusions with the disdain they feel these merit.
In very short order, the pair are pulled apart, their links attenuated by the power of Paris itself. Inez is seduced by a pal into touring sites guided by a pompous pedant. Gil, however, finds himself literally and figuratively transported, spirited away by night to the Paris of the legendary twenties, where he meets and greets his artistic and literary heroes and sheroes, from Gertrude Stein to Hemingway, and everything in between. It thus becomes a feast for anyone who ever sat through a course on or otherwise became enthralled with the Jazz Age, the Lost Generation and the peculiar charm postwar Paris held for North American expatriates of every hue and station.
The time travel trope, while well worn, affords us a delightful window into the past, and Owen Wilson, already well known for his comedic gifts, brings a refreshing level of depth to this everyman who simply wants to be taken seriously by those he loves. Of course, auteur, i.e., author Allen is pulling all the strings behind the scenes, but we, too, become subject to capture by the power Paris personifies. This is evident from the opening sequence, when colors, hours, seasons and changing climatic conditions parade before our eyes. In some ways the opener is itself a film within a film.
Each actor forces viewers to take them seriously, not infrequently with marvelous results. Kathy Bates is especially arresting as Stein, and McAdams as Inez effectively demonstrates the distance between herself and Gil that each of them papered over when living a world away. Indeed this is one of the threats foreign travel may pose to any intimate relationship. And true to form, Paris by midnight opens other doors.
Every detail in Midnight in Paris is well plotted out, very like a French painting. The cameos of Carla Bruni as a museum guide, Adrian Brody as Salvador Dalí and Corey Stoll as a predictably tempestuous Ernest Hemingway are all worth watching. Allen plays with time and space in several sequences that go even further back to La Belle Époque, the period from the 1890s until the First World War that postwar artists felt a golden age, thereby capturing each generation’s wistful fantasy of a classical epoch that preceded it, that they missed, while they might well be living through their own.
While I emphasized the artistic angle of this work, other virtues are its humor and accessibility. One can learn of places and times presented but not through lectures alone, a point made by the contrasting styles of modest museum guide with puffed up prof. Allowing artists to speak eloquently of their art has an impact as edifying as an audience admits. However deeply we wish to delve, Midnight in Paris rewards us.
For the KUSP Film Gang, this is David Anthony