Quality Cinema, Fun Movie, But A Few Things Missing.

Rating: 7/10 (30 May 2011)

Its Woody Allen shooting a movie about the struggles of 'the artist' in Paris. It can't be bad, and it isn't bad. But just how good is the film? My answer: pretty good, but far from great.
Allen fixates upon the city as the muse of artists both past and present. His opening shots of Paris set the stage for the ongoing love affair his protagonist Gill (Owen Wilson) has with the city and the city's rich history as fertile ground for artistic endeavor. Owen as Gill, succeeds in playing a struggling writer who is trying to escape his success as a Hollywood actor in cookie-cutter movies. He waxes poetic to his fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams) about his desire to leave Pasadena and relocate to Paris permanently. This is where Allen creates the initial tension for our protagonist. Gill wants to walk the streets that Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Picasso walked. He wants to be a real artist, and he is confronted with this growing realization while trying to plan a life with Inez, who is the rich, soulless American caricature of Hollywood emptiness.
On his midnight walks, Wilson delves into the Paris of the 1920s and with each evening he is pushed away from the reality of a life with Inez toward a life of Parisian wistful inspiration. Allen juggles some difficult plot devices that are wholly unbelievable but nonetheless enjoyable. To say that the 20s "come to life" for Wilson would be both physically and psychologically accurate. All the while, his fiancée and her Republican parents and snooty friends question his actions, spurn his artistic flightiness and serve to establish the materialistic sadness that blinds people from the sights that Gill cherishes, the beauty and inspiration of Paris that can't be discovered in the Museum but, instead, must be sought out on its streets, preferably in the rain.
The theme of the present day artist yearning for the past glory periods of art whether it be the 1920s or 1890s is force fed to the viewer. Allen builds this theme up and slowly questions it as the movie drifts onward, but in delivering a verbal and concise conclusion on the issue, I felt he left little to the audiences imagination.
Additionally, the conflict we want from an Allen movie, the inner turmoil, the multiple plot line craziness, the sexual and sensual aspects, all of these cinematic fingerprints that identify an Allen movie are largely washed out in this film. There is a growing sense of flow to the film that allows the viewer to know which way the wind is blowing and how things will conclude, and when they finally do, it makes for a nice story of art winning the day, but it lacks the whirlwind emotions so frequently associated with a Woody Allen movie. For literature fans, for Allen fans, and for general movie fans, its worth a viewing, but its not a mind blowing film.