Review

Review Date: 5-June-11
Spoiler Rating: High
Juju Judgment: Juicy

Midnight in Paris (2011)

Midnight in Paris is one of the most whimsical of Woody Allen's films, a fluffy soufflé of fanciful characters and circumstances. It's also a movie with a message which is delivered rather ham-handedly. The plot follows a Hollywood screenwriter named Gil (Owen Wilson) who is vacationing with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and her upper-crust parents. While they view Paris as an opportunity to shop and feign sophistication, Gil views it as an inspiration to the novelist inside him who has long been stifled. He fantasizes about the glory days in the 1920s when some of the century's greatest artists flocked to Paris to uncover deep truths in smoky cafés. The city's beauty allows him to groove on this vibe despite his fiancée's advice to stick with screenwriting because it's lucrative. Choosing to ignore their incompatibility, he follows her around with minimal complaint even when she insists on sightseeing with a flaming blowhard. (He's played with delicious repulsiveness by Michael Sheen.) But one tipsy night Gil escapes to wander on his own. As a clock nearby a cobbled street strikes twelve, he is transported back to the very epoch of his fantasy.

Time travel in the movies is like popular belief in reincarnation: no one is ever associated with someone boring in the past. Allen blows this conceit to ridiculous proportions. Right off the bat Gil falls in with Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, who introduce him to Ernest Hemingway while Cole Porter warbles in the background. (Hemingway is a hoot; I envision hilarious bloopers of actor Corey Stoll losing his deadpan while declaring one über-macho sentiment after the other.) For several nights Gil returns to the past to hobnob with notables, receiving editorial advice from Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) and wooing Pablo Picasso's latest conquest (Marion Cotillard). Appropriately, the over-the-topness of his journey peaks with a rhinoceros-obsessed Salvador Dali, who is brought to manic life by Adrien Brody.

Not a whit of Gil's nocturnal adventures can be taken seriously, and yet Allen strives to conclude (and makes Gil stridently conclude) that there is an important difference between romance and nostalgia. One person's golden age is another person's uninteresting present, so fetishizing another time is but a symptom of internal dissatisfaction. Romance, on the other hand, is an inspirational force which can be found in any day and age if one is open to it (and has the means to go somewhere like Paris). This message arrives abruptly and with unsubtle enablers like a handy new girlfriend and a loophole from feeling guilt. Being a historical fetishist myself, I wasn't ready to embrace the moral of Midnight in Paris, especially when the twenties scenes have so much more style than those in the present. But this didn't dampen my enjoyment of Allen's giddy tale.

Copyright © 2011 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.