OK but could have been so much better

Rating: 6/10 (31 August 2012)

Like the man at the movie's core, I was hoping to be transported to a different time and place while watching Woody Allen's universally acclaimed "Midnight in Paris." What I got instead was a sporadically charming but surprisingly earthbound little fantasy that had me pining away over lost opportunities with the Lost Generation.
The conceit - not terribly original in and of itself but filled with promise and possibilities - involves an American writer visiting modern-day Paris who is whisked away every midnight to the 1920s where he hobnobs with many of the great writers, artists and thinkers of the time: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Josephine Baker, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel, and others.
So far, so good. Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is portrayed as a hopeless romantic who, as we are too often wont to do, believes that life was better in a time before he was born - an idealized era where life was richer, simpler and somehow more satisfying than it is today. For Gil, that ideal period is the Paris of the 1920s, which he envisions as a scene of endless literary and intellectual discussions amongst a rarified elite. He's engaged to Inez (Rachel McAdams), a much more prosaic 21st Century woman, whose father (Kurt Fuller) is a right-wing tea-party type and whose mother (Mimi Kennedy) looks with disdain on her daughter's life choices, including the man she's picked to marry. No wonder Gil rushes back every night to that space/time continuum portal that allows him to be with the people he really likes and who seem to like and understand him.
The main problem for me with "Midnight in Paris" is that it is unable to bring its roster of extraordinary historical figures to life. In fact, they emerge basically as some of the blandest people you are ever likely to meet, this century or last. They wouldn't even make a good cocktail party crowd. Not one of them says anything insightful or witty that would in any way indicate that they are world-famous artists and creators of lasting works. And without that dimension, Gil's trips to the past have all the excitement and authenticity of a dress-up ball that never ends.
The scenes set in the present are scarcely any better. Inez' family and their pompous, know-it-all friend, played by Michael Sheen, are just the Ugly American writ large, and the humor is surprisingly toothless and lacking for a Woody Allen movie. Wilson, who has been effective in other roles, here feels too much like a stand-in for a younger version of Allen himself to make much of an impression of his own.
So what of the glorious views of Paris that one would expect from such a film? Surely, those are worth the price of admission. Actually, not really, for the cinematographer, Darius Khonji, has, for some inexplicable reason, seen fit to cast the city in a strangely sickly yellowish glow that robs the place of much of its natural beauty and luster.
So what is good about the film? Well, there are some genuinely tender moments between Gil and Adriana, the on-again/off-again mistress of Pablo Picasso, who suffers from Gil's idealization of the past, only to her, that rosier past lies in the era known as La Belle Epoque. And there's a very funny in-movie scene in which Gil gives a bemused and befuddled Luis Bunuel the idea for what the surrealist will later turn into "The Exterminating Angel." The movie also does a nice job fleshing out its theme - of the illusion of a Golden Age vs. the reality of a present day - in the final reel.
More virtues like these and "Midnight in Paris" might have been the truly transporting charmer it was meant to be.