A Movable Least

Rating: 1/10 (29 May 2011)

Owen Wilson is a flustered Hollywood scriptwriter/wannabe novelist on a trip to Paris with his agitated fiancée (with clichéd right wing parents and clichéd left wing pseudo-intellectual friends).
Troubled by perpetual indifference, he ventures alone into the night and is too-easily taken back to the 1930s. There he meets the likes of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Cole Porter, and the every-artist den mother, Gertrude Stein. Hemingway speaks like a robot reciting Hemingway, while Fitzgerald flaunts his drunkenly troubled, airhead wife, Zelda. Picasso's in love with a fickle beauty while Owen Wilson, displaying his usual surfer deadpan, as a person thrust into another era acts as if nothing's going on – and that's the problem.
Woody Allen treats time travel like walking to a corner store, making Paris, the inspiration for a film spanning two (actually three) time periods, feel commonplace; while the actors portraying the famous inhabitants seem like dullards at a costume party.
Although one conversation – as Wilson and his love interest (Picasso's ex) discuss the importance of nostalgia – does effectively engage the theme of seeking another era for inspiration. So perhaps Woody Allen can transport himself back to the seventies and eighties – he might be able to relearn the art of movie/magic, something he hasn't effectively concocted for many years.