Pretty good

Rating: 7/10 (21 June 2011)

An enjoyable, if slight, Woody Allen comedy. I probably would have enjoyed this more on video than in the theater, however. I don't think there has ever been a film that invited more forced laughter than this one. It's funny, but rarely laugh-out-loud funny. But you wouldn't know that from the audience, who guffawed at the mere appearance of Henri Matisse. The one person in the audience besides me to have heard of The Exterminating Angel made sure to let me know by her laughter during the film's very unfunny Marvin Berry moment. Of course, everyone cackled loudly when Salvador Dali popped up. So everyone by now knows the story: Owen Wilson, playing the Woody Allen surrogate, plays a Hollywood writer entranced with the city of Paris during his trip there. He's annoyed by his stuffy future-wife (Rachel McAdams) and her even stuffier parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy). During a midnight walk through the city, he gets picked up by an old automobile and transported to Paris of the 1920s, where he meets F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill), Ernest Hemmingway (Corey Stoll), Gertrud Stein (Kathy Bates), Pablo Picasso (Marcial di Fonzo Bo) and other famous figures from the era. He also meets Picasso's current girlfriend, played by Marion Cotillard, and falls for her. Not surprising how quickly he would leave McAdams, who plays such an awfully detestable shrew it's hard to believe anyone even remotely like Wilson's character would put up with her for over two minutes, let alone propose to her at some point. McAdams and her parents are so awful that any sequence that takes place in the present are borderline painful. Fortunately, the sequences where Wilson visits the past, as annoyingly congratulatory as they are, are quite delightful. Wilson ain't half bad, and Cotillard, as always, is enchanting. Most of the historical figures are kind of fun to hang out with. Who wouldn't want to hear Ernest Hemmingway talk about hunting lions all night long? Of course, it helps that Paris really is beautiful, and Allen films it with a fine eye.