Should have shown the script to Hemingway

Rating: 6/10 (10 October 2011)

I picked this DVD up in a backstreet, but when I got it home Paris Hilton was nowhere to be seen! Swindlers, I tell you! Okay, okay, this is Woody Allen's latest and again, another 'return to form'. My sister said it was delightful, but she had no expectations. Any UK guy might recall a BBC comedy called Goodnight Sweetheart from the 1980s in which a young man steps into a pub and finds himself back in the 1940s, where he meets and falls in love with a belle from back then, committing a kind of time-travellers adultery. This has a similar theme only it's an American Owen Wilson (who looks not wholly unlike Nicholas Lyndhurst) who gets in a Rolls and finds himself back in Paris in the 1920s, his ideal time.
It's a decent premise. I didn't take to the film however. It has lovely opening shots of Paris, but the cinematography is very plain and grainy and Woody's style is very point and shoot throughout. Don't expect much depth here. Wilson falls into the trap of just imitating Woody, like most his leading men do, and it's a distraction. Actually, I thought Johnny Galecki from The Big Bang Theory would have been excellent in the role, as he has real comic chops and I'm not sure Wilson does really.
Michael Sheen (Blair) turns up as a pompous bore, the sort you see in Allen's films sometimes, and gets plaudits for being wholly unlike his Blair persona. Initially you find yourself thinking that talk of him being a Bond villain is really not wide of the mark at all. Until, that is, you realise that he's doing another of his impersonations - it's a young Anthony Hopkins. Again, Sheen is not bad, but doesn't really nail the humour of the situation, though it gets indulgent audience titters.
The scenes where our hero finds himself in 1920s Paris lack authenticity and is all too broadly drawn for my taste, with Hemingway seeming a real bore and the whole thing might as well be set in a 1920s themed speakeasy bar in Shoreditch. All these literary legends of the time take to Wilson, though he seems to bring nothing to the party at all, has nothing of interest to say to them. And you never get much sense of why he might feel disillusionment for the time: wouldn't a neurotic like Allen realise that they never washed their hands after using the john back then? What about the casual racism of the time? The smoke, the dirt in the air? It's all rather superficially done. As Hemingway says at one point, it doesn't matter what the story is, so long as it's told well, and I don't think this was told very well.
Carla Brunei puts in a good cameo, she's actually quite good.