Woody Is Back

Rating: 8/10 (4 June 2011)

There was a time when I used to say: "Even a bad Woody Allen movie is better than most films." And I think I have seen them all - liking some films better than the critics. His recent films have been less and less interesting as he has produced scripts which recycled really old jokes of his own. Many themes come back again and again without new insight and without being very funny with the retelling. There were the familiar characters in different bodies and tired, stale material. Woody was becoming the writer/director who was once great.
Midnight in Paris is the old Woody with fresh material. Owen Wilson looks the fresh-faced American he is. Gone are the elderly male coupled with the too-young young female leads. Wilson plays a successful Hollywood writer going through a career crisis. He wants so much to be an important writer of fiction - not a Hollywood hack. He adores the vision of Paris in the twenties, the "Moveable Feast" years. His bride- to-be, played by Rachel McAdams, wants a successful man who will provide a nice life. Her parents are in Paris and she wants a life like theirs. The Wilson character is a restatement of the Fitzgerald dilemma: easy money for lousy scripts versus time-consuming exhaustive effort to create important fiction.
There are some hilarious lines when the four get together. It was worth watching the film for those scenes alone.
There is an "Alice in Wonderland" plot twist which takes Wilson's character down the rabbit hole and back into the Paris he yearns to experience. Suddenly he is hobnobbing with the Fitzgeralds, drinking with Hemingway, flirting with Picasso's mistress and meeting the Who's Who of the Lost Generation. Gertrude Stein reads his novels and suggests changes. He is living his dream at night. He returns to the present during the day.
Maybe I liked the film so much because I would like to take that ride back into time. There is a trite lesson about the fallacy of thinking that any age is a Golden Age. There are some predictable resolutions to the story, but, all in all, it is a fun film. Woody has gotten his chops back. The material is fresher, more interesting and better than he has produced in a long, long while.
We have seen many films which display a love of the City of Paris. Woody adores Paris and shows us why we should love it too. It's not a hard sell. Paris is every bit as lovely as described, but he takes us to an even better place.