Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen has been churning out roughly one movie a year for the last 143 years, and he shows no signs of slowing down. I don’t imagine that very many people are going to be swayed by the news that this is his best-reviewed movie in many years. Some might find themselves slightly less disinterested when they learn that Allen himself is not in this particular movie. Others will see it without knowing anything about it other than that it is the new Woody Allen movie—because for some people, Woody Allen can do no wrong. I loved it because it’s steeped in literature and art, and those things appeal to me. They don’t appeal to everyone. So what if it’s the best movie Allen has done since Husbands and Wives…what does that even mean? You know? It’s crazy!

This is the story of Gil (Owen Wilson, in the role played so often in the past by Woody Allen), the accidental tourist, as it were, who is in Paris with his fiancée and her pretentious, elitist parents (who support the retarded Tea Party, of course!). He’s a frustrated writer who is trying to escape what he sees as the tedium of screenwriting for the loftier goal of being a novelist; and during a somewhat drunken walk through the streets of Paris one night (while his fiancée is off dancing with another pretentious couple), just as the clock strikes midnight, a car stops along the street where he is walking—and the people inside beckon him to join them.

The people inside the car are Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and they take Gil with them to a party where Gil is introduced to Ernest Hemingway, who suggests that Gil show his manuscript to Gertrude Stein to get her take on it, since she has always been honest with Hemingway’s work. At Stein’s house, Gil meets and starts to fall in love with Adriana, Pablo Picasso’s mistress. Claiming writer’s prerogative, he skips out on activities with his fiancée and her family each night and goes to meet the car that will whisk him away to his new friends from 1920s Paris. Eventually Gil rewrites part of his novel and shows it to Stein again, who says he is on the right track. He winds up taking a walk with Adriana one night and going back even further in time, to the Belle Époque, Adriana’s idea of the golden age of Paris. Gil is momentarily floored by the idea that someone from the Jazz Age could possibly think that any other time in history would be a better time to have lived in; and then he begins to understand the subtle shadings that separate idealism from realism.

Like a lot of recent Woody Allen movies, there isn’t a lot of subtext here. Allen plays with the idea that life would be much grander if we could simply zip back in time to the period when we would have liked to live, but by the end he steers Gil toward the somewhat melancholic understanding that most people wouldn’t be any happier in any other time and place than the one they currently occupy. He also steers Gil toward a girl whose interests more closely align with his own than did those of his fiancée (with whom he breaks up in a scene that descends only slightly into the turgid morass of fatalism that sometimes tails Allen’s characters like weepy shadows).

At this point you might be thinking that I’m giving away the store, and in a way you would be correct; but the underpinnings of this story are standard rom-com stuff, with a small twist: the nice guy winds up with what might be the right girl (though not—and this is the twist—what might be the ideal girl), and he comes to understand himself and life a little bit better along the way. The film adds a dose of realism, too, by making the Republicans look, sound, and behave like idiots—just like they do in real life!

This is not one of those movies where the point is to puzzle out the ending or decipher the mystifying symbolism. Since Allen’s working thesis is that wishing for a different life is an unrealistic fantasy, he turns most of the film into an unrealistic fantasy and lets his main character loose in it in order to test the hypothesis. Some of the characters, such as Hemingway and Dalí, are drawn with broad strokes as caricatures (Hemingway, especially); some are drawn more closely to their historical selves, like Josephine Baker and Gertrude Stein; and some are just barely hinted at, like Buñuel and (more’s the pity, for me anyway) T.S. Eliot. The fun lies in watching the actors play up the idiosyncracies of these artists and writers—and there’s a lot of that fun to be had.