satisfying romantic comedy

Rating: Null/10 (19 October 2011)

To fully enjoy "Midnight in Paris" it helps to have some knowledge of the world of arts and letters as it unfolded in Paris during the years between the first and second World Wars. Without such knowledge, the steady stream of verbal references and incarnations of past celebrities may wear you out. Writer-director Woody Allen develops comic momentum by transporting a young writer (Owen Wilson) back in time where he encounters one famous Golden Age figure after another, starting with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, then Cole and Linda Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali and others. Sometimes the portrayals hit the bull's eye and at other times fly off to nowhere. For one reason or another Kathy Bates and Adrien Brody, both capable performers, bring nothing fresh or compelling to Stein and Dali, respectively. Michael Sheen is, as usual, outstanding as an egotistical intellectual in the 2010 segments, delivering his lines with an impeccable American accent.
It's filled with Allen's wisdom, insight and irony, and of course cascades of conversation, most of it scintillatingly observant, funny, surprising and lively. He has a way of scoring a witticism and then undercutting it before it has a chance to sit there and draw attention to its impressiveness. His insistent puncturing of pretense and falsehood is intact. Allen has set many movies in the past ("The Purple Rose of Cairo," "Zelig," "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" to name a few) but here he takes the time travel one step further by going back even further into the past while already there, exploring the human longing for the golden age that never really was. And throughout we are presented with numberless views of Paris at all times of the day and night, rain and shine, all tied up with a beautiful romantic ribbon at the end.