An Awful Stuck In The Head Movie

Rating: 3/10 (17 January 2019)

11 March 2012. I found Midnight in Paris unbelievable, unappealing, and unapproachable. Woody Allen's imprint is all over this movie, but his fantasy theme failed to carry over onto the movie screen. The dialogue and scenes were dissociated from any emotional connection and became more of visual and auditory reading of Woody Allen's own mental musings. He failed to capture the intense flavor and rhythm of Paris, insisting on his scripted words. He had Gil (performed by Owen Wilson) becoming a one-dimensional, monotone character who remains in an oblivious state throughout the movie. Add to Gil's unappealing character, an even more obnoxious fiancé who can't even be made to appear sexually seductive even needed. How can these two characters be together in the first place? This relationship is a mere a plot device, adding to the absurdity of the movie. Later Gil meets Adrianna played by Marion Cotillard's (the most important relationship) whose wonderful and delightful character watches helplessly with fewer script lines as Owen Wilson's character remains blank to the different surroundings that he takes in so nonchalantly at odds with the circumstances. If only Wooden Allen had made Marion Cotillard the primary character, then perhaps her performance or character itself might have been able to carry the movie sufficiently to make it bearable to watch. As it is, Gil unintentionally becomes a parody of the comedic Jerry Lewis or Don Knott's idiot character appearing as witless lout who cannot possibly be this amazing, creative writer.
By a small stretch of the imagination, it seems like the characters in Midnight in Paris are, at times, just following Woody Allen's direction in a stylistic, deliberate way that don't reflect any authentic performance, many appearing as robotic on the screen. If only Gil had been inebriated or Woody Allen had incorporated Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone (1959-1964, television series), the movie might have been more approachable as a fantasy. The needed suspension of belief required in a fantasy is made even more difficult with Kathy Bate's character being like Kathy Bates. Even in her beginning scene seems as if she was reading her lines off a cue card or teleprompter. Midnight in Paris is scattered throughout with dialogue with so much lofty intellectual mumbo-jumbo as if being spoken from a script - or lifted from the old live radio theater which doesn't really transfer well onto film. There are the sudden shifts from modern-day Paris to the past and back against without any of mysterious, mesmerizing blending of eeriness. Over a quarter century earlier, director Fred Haines successfully created a more haunting, subtle, mystically surrealistic movie adaptation of Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf (1974).
Woody Allen introduces extras like the zombie walking man pushing a hand-cart that only heightens the wooden feeling of and detachment of the movie. There's an irrelevant dog extra scene, an unnecessary stealing from the wife's jewelry case scene. There's the inclusion of the underdeveloped private investigator scenes that only serve Woody Allen's need to arrive at a more surprisingly common place American ending. Such devices are more the stuff of Peter Seller's slapstick comedy The Pink Panther (1963) instead of Woody Allen's more sophisticated romantic comedy New York-style. He then misses such opportunities of tapping into the magical appearance of a horse carriage. When it only takes an extra with brief scenes as a shop girl to carry the aliveness of the entire scene, her brief realness and easy flowing portrayal only serves to emphasize how lost and empty most of the main characters have become, especially Gil. Woody Allen's script only offers tantalizing glimpses of a multitude of famous people from the past, but they only seem to be inserted as cute cameos. The whole movie ends up to be drops of tid-bit fragments - of what psychologists would define as "loosening of associations" often associated with manic patients (Trzepacz and Baker, 1993). In a way, this movie is reminiscent of the award winning California Suite (1978) written by Neil Simon that didn't connect well with the audience or of the adapted screenplay movies Noises Off (1992) or Chorus Line (1985) neither of which transferred well to the movie screen.
In some ways, Woody Allen's script is stuck in the past that is both predictable and not as spontaneously charming as it should be. Woody Allen continues passing up opportunity after opportunity to create a more gripping, raw, and compelling relational, morally intriguing movie. Instead he offers up only an odd and confusing choice between Gil's fiancé and Andrianna where there is really no suspense nor build up. Much more compelling and engaging movies are the more thought provoking Anthony Hopkins' Slipstream (2007), the more daring stark play-as-a-movie Dogville (2004), or more recent complex sci fi action romance Inception (2010). A better time travel movie that retains its charm is Kate & Leopold (2001) or the less well known Time After Time (1979) or The Lake House (2006) each of these movies having more appeal possessing captivating adventure and energy. Midnight in Paris instead is distance, jumping through haphazard scenes, underdeveloped plots, and character much like an unfinished jig saw puzzle that still leaves hundreds of individual or grouped pieces scattered about making the movie a disaster. Instead I would check out Time Bandits (1981), Pleasantville (1998), The Time Traveler's Wife (2009), Somewhere in Time (1980), Back to the Future (1985) or Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). Even the animated Caroline (2009) or Spirited Away (2001) offers similar but more involved, enchanting fantasies or a movie with the same foreign flavor and love essence, A Man and A Woman (1966) quietly dazzles and enriches with an intimately involving relationship.