Midnight in Paris

“It’s the present: it’s dull.”

by Jonathan McDonald

You have to hand it to Woody Allen. He may, at his worst, churn out a decade’s worth of mediocre movies in a row, but he stays persistent, and his persistence always pays off. For every Scoop and Anything Else, there’s a Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point. Now, we can add Midnight in Paris to the list of Allen’s much-better-than-mediocre creations. The casting of Owen Wilson as the protagonist Gil Pender is strange at first glance, considering Wilson’s penchant for starring in comedies fit only for baboons, but Wilson has also been a long-time writing partner with director Wes Anderson, making films that are both poignant and insightful. It’s probably no mistake that Wilson does so well playing a Hollywood screenwriter who’s dissatisfied with the movies he’s helped make.

Then again, it’s also Allen who is mirrored in the protagonist’s plight. A while back I read an interview with Allen (sadly I have forgotten where) in which he laments his failure to become a better writer, particularly in prose rather than screenwriting. “The only thing between me and genius,” he said, “is me.” He is of course well known for inserting his own thoughts into his characters’ minds and mouths, leading some to complain that he narcissistically projects his neuroses onto his fictional creations and does not allow them to live their own lives which might be entirely alien to his own experience. There is something to be said for that critique, certainly, and perhaps this is part of what keeps him from true artistic greatness: himself. If only he could but depict the lives of others with the same insight he casts upon himself.

All that being said, Midnight in Paris is still a magnificent piece of film. Gil Pender is unhappy with his work, but with good reason. It is implied that he makes a large amount of money from his screenwriting work, but to be living as comfortably as him, he must be working on drafts of movies like Transformers and Clash of the Titans. It’s a living, but of the kind that deadens one’s soul. Despite his strong ties to America he is in love with Paris, and hates that his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) does not share his passion. He dreams of living in the Paris of the 1920s, when such luminaries as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway walked the streets of Paris together, infecting one another with their artistic zeal. Those days, he thinks, were so much more full of art and life, of love and thought, of poetry and prose. So of course one night an antique cab rolls up to the curb and drives him straight into the Roaring Twenties.

What unfolds from there is a mixture of magical realism, doomed romance and self discovery. For a while it seems that Pender will find happiness living amongst his literary idols, and perhaps with the young Adriana (Marion Cotillard, Inception)—the hanger-on lover who gets passed along between the artists like a fine cigar—but when she starts mimicking his yearning for an earlier, purer age, he begins having doubts about his own desires. Is it really better to live in the past, even if demonstrably great figures lived and loved at that time? Or is is better to live realistically in the present, a time which is much more difficult to idealize if only because one is far too familiar with all of its subtle failings? Hindsight is 20-20, and sometimes so is love.

Midnight in Paris is not Allen’s best movie, but it deserves a place among them. Simply for the great attention to period detail and the outright fun one has in watching the past come back to life, this is a worthwhile film. Where else are you likely to find a young Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) drunkenly challenging everyone in the room to a boxing match and Salvador Dalí (Adrien Brody) drunkenly state with all solemnity that “I see a rhinoceros”? For Allen it may be a way of taking a cold, hard look at himself and his own artistic career; more generally it may be a moral tract against avoiding the reality of the present day. Both are great topics.

Rating: Unforgettable

Written on June 13, 2011 by Jonathan
Letter posting is disabled
Points of Interest: , , , ,