A Mediocre Trip to the City of Love

Rating: 6/10 (30 January 2012)

I suppose if I had seen "Midnight in Paris" back when it first came out, before the awards hype and hyperbolic praise started proclaiming it one of the best movies of the year, I would have thought it was a perfectly fine if unmemorable Woody Allen movie, certainly better than many of his most recent efforts but not nearly as good as some others. But expectations were high after it started appearing on 10-best lists and winning awards, and so instead of enjoying the film for its modest charms, I was left wondering what on earth people saw in this that warrants its rapturous response.
I long ago accepted that Woody Allen is going to traffic in tired clichés for the rest of his career. But an artist falling in love with the charms of Paris has to be one of the most tired. There is some fun to be had in waiting to see what famous names Owen Wilson's author character is going to come across next, and I have to imagine that what critics are responding to is the idea of one artist being able to interact directly with those long-dead artists who serve as their muses. So some scenes with characters like Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, the Fitzgeralds, etc. offer some pleasant whimsy. But the real-life part of the screenplay, detailing Wilson's excruciatingly slow realization that he and his horrible fiancée (written as a completely unbelievable caricature and played as a simply despicable human being by Rachel MacAdams) are not meant for one another, takes up far too much time. Not only is this part of the movie tedious, it's badly written, one criticism I usually can't level at Allen's screenplays.
Sure, Paris looks lovely, but it surely says something about the movie that the thing I most remember about it is the performance of Alison Pill, a scene stealer as Zelda Fitzgerald but who has exactly three minutes of screen time.
Grade: B-