Watchable, but forgettable Woody Allen time travel fluff

Rating: 4/10 (16 January 2012)

There's an old Twilight Zone episode, a fantasy-drama called 'The Trouble with Templeton' which came out during the iconic show's second season. It's a similar concept to 'Midnight in Paris'. Templeton is a fading stage director who believes that his glory days were back in the 20s and gets the opportunity go back there and learn an important lesson. Unlike the Twilight Zone episode, Woody Allen's story is more of a romantic comedy. It features Owen Wilson as a hack Hollywood screenwriter who aspires for more as a high brow novelist. Wilson is the protagonist, Gil, who's vacationing in Paris with his fiancée and her parents. Wilson delivers many of Woody Allen's expressions in the same way as 'The Master' and that's probably why Woody praises him vociferously during the news conference extra in the DVD bonus section.
As in many other Woody Allen films, the protagonist is friendly with another couple, with the male partner depicted as a pretentious intellectual. Woody also gets his ubiquitous digs in at right wingers, making jokes at the Tea Party's expense, through the mouth of the father-in-law to be, a corporate executive who decidedly is in the Republican camp. As usual, Woody's protagonist must move on from a failed relationship with a woman at the end; in this case, it's the fiancé, Inez, perkily played by Rachel McAdams.
The central conceit of 'Midnight in Paris' is Gil's time traveling back to the 1920s in Paris. Woody doesn't come up with a very clever mode of transport: a limousine from the 20s appears out of the blue at midnight on a Parisian street and whisks our protagonist back to those heady days where he runs into the likes of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.
During the news conference on the DVD, Woody makes it clear that his intent is to satirize the artistes whom Gil runs into. At first, it's rather neat to watch a perennially intoxicated Zelda Fitzgerald do her thing as well as listen to Cole Porter at the piano, but soon we realize that Woody has little to say about these iconic figures. Hemingway isn't very amusing blathering about all his macho concerns and Picasso shows up merely as a buffoon, seducing one woman after another. Adrien Brody tries his best to suck out humor from a pretentious Salvador Dali but ultimately is unable to come up with anything funny. There's a brief, slightly humorous bit where Gil suggests to the surrealist film director, Bunuel, the concept for his classic picture, "The Exterminating Angel", with the exasperated director rejecting it since he tells Gil that it doesn't make any sense. Kathy Bates has little to do as Gertrude Stein, except offering her critique of Gil's new manuscript.
A good part of 'Midnight' has to do with Gil's infatuation with Adriana, one of Picasso's cast-offs. When Gil finds Adriana's autobiography at a bookseller in the present, he learns that he gave her a pair of earrings back in the 20s. This leads to an awkward scene where he attempts to steal Inez's earrings in order to fulfill the prophetic passage in Adriana's book. Gil is interrupted by Inez and her parents, who have returned to the hotel room after the father has some kind of heart scare. Gil's machinations, attempting to prevent Inez from discovering that he stole the earrings, don't cut it since he could have avoided the whole predicament by buying earrings for Adriana at a store the next day (and that's what predictably transpires!).
Gil finally learns an important life lesson that living in the past is useless when he joins Adriana in traveling back to her golden age of the 1890s. Back in the 20s, Hemingway speculates that Inez has been cheating on Gil, who confronts her when he returns to the present time.
'Midnight in Paris' is watchable but I guarantee you'll forget about this film after a few days. Please note that Lea Seydoux is sensational as Gabrielle, the bookseller babe that Owen Wilson walks off into the sunset with at film's end!