Woody in Paris

Rating: 9/10 (19 April 2012)

Wow, Woody Allen took on New York City for years, and everyone was shocked when he set his film Match Point in London. Now here is in Paris, the City of Lights, and it looks just as gorgeous as one who has never been there imagines it. And he gives us a story to match.
Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams play Gil, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, and his fiancée Inez, an engaged couple who go to Paris with her parents (Mimi Kennedy and Kurt Fuller) before their wedding. Tired of the Hollywood scene Gil is hard at work on his first novel, which is about a man who works in a nostalgia shop. Gil falls in love with Paris and wants to settle there, but Inez has her heart set on Malibu. The time with Inez and her parents soon becomes tedious, in part due to an old professor of Inez's, Paul and his wife, Carol (Michael Sheen and Nina Arianda), whom Gil finds insufferable. Slowly he realizes that Inez and her parents' values are different from his, so he finds himself leaving them to their own activities and going off by himself.
One night, he walks home from a restaurant and gets lost. As he's sitting on some steps, an old-fashioned car pulls up and invites him in. He realizes that he's in the company of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who take him to a party where Cole Porter is playing the piano, and then to a bar, where he meets Ernest Hemingway. Somehow, he is back in Paris of the '20s, though he returns to 2010.
The next night, Gil rushes Inez to the spot, but she gets bored and leaves before the clock strikes midnight, at which point, another old car pulls up. Over the various nights, Gil meets Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Alice B. Toklas (who agrees to read his manuscript), Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali (Adrian Brody), Cole Porter, T. S. Eliot, Paul Gauguin, Toulouse-LaTrec, Degas, sees Josephine Baker perform, and goes to Maxim's. The one who makes the biggest impression is Picasso's lover, Ariadne (Marion Cotillard) with whom he falls in love.
Though on the surface a light time-travel film, "Midnight in Paris" tackles some interesting subjects, not the least of which is discovering who you are and what you want and that it doesn't jive with your companion's. More fascinating, though, is the nostalgia aspect, that other eras always seem more exciting, simpler, and better, and that in the end, the wish to return to another time is just an escape from the angst of the present. To his surprise, he finds that Adriana longs for the Belle-Epoque era, feeling that the '20s are the way that Paul would describe the 2000 millennium thus far. He learns an important lesson.
What a wonderful film, with each person looking like the character he or she plays -- Bates is a fabulous Gertrude Stein, Brody is a delightful Dali, and Corey Stoll a convincing Hemingway. Tom Hiddleston looks like photos of Fitzgerald. As the somewhat shallow Inez, Rachel McAdams is perfect - a sexy shop till you drop woman who wants the fairy tale. Wilson seems to copy Woody Allen's line readings at times, and he's just right as a confused young man looking for something but unsure that that is. He only knows something is missing.
Allen is very prolific, and sometimes he hits, and sometimes he misses -- but as far as I'm concerned, he doesn't miss very often. His writing and direction of "Midnight in Paris" are solid, and he has another winner. Even at his age, he continues literally to broaden his horizons -- next he's going to Rome and Copenhagen. Some gifts, it seems, just keep on giving.