The Sun Also Rises come to life, in a way...a fun, lightweight time trip

Rating: Null/10 (12 July 2011)

Midnight in Paris (2011)
Total wish fulfillment. Who wouldn't want to drift back now and then and visit some cultural heroes in their own time--you know, Ernest Hemingway, Cole Porter, Picasso?
Well, that's all this movie does. It does it brilliantly, and in the "flashbacks" which are really more like time travel scenes, the set design, music, and invented dialog of these icons is terrific. Like many people, I think Paris in the 1920s was the greatest cultural hot spot since Florence in the Renaissance.
But that's all this movie really does, and if it's enough, you're going to love it. The plot laid over this, including a strained and irritating cast of early 21st Century ungrateful Ugly Americans, is painful. Not only does it seem false (like these are just "types" without real depth), but it's crudely filmed (lighting and camera-work) and actually badly acted, overall.
You might think this was all on purpose, to contrast in every way then and now. Certainly it's the same crew, same writer (Woody Allen), and same director (Woody Allen) in both parts of the movie.
And same lead actor, Owen Wilson, who is perfect in both roles (he is the one consistent presence). He's a dreamy writer who likes Paris in the rain. And he wishes he could just go back to those glory days when the arts were spilling out of the cafes at night on the Left Bank. So, by magic, he does, and so do we. If everything is a cliché, it almost has to be--Gertrude Stein played wonderfully by Kathy Bates, Zelda Fitzgerald by Alison Pill. There are some twenty famous people who show up (some briefly, like Man Ray, who is badly portrayed, and Josephine Baker, who doesn't get a speaking part, naturally). But they are all backdrop, in a way, to the idea, the time travel foremost but also the bigger idea that we sometimes think we'd be happier in another time.
And the movie ends on the sweet note that in fact we just need to look around at what we have in our time and appreciate it.
As a movie beyond just entertainment, it's easy to get frustrated. One good friend of mine, a true movie buff and not a Woody Allen fan, loved it. But he's a nostalgia freak. In the theater, two young women got up and left after half an hour, even while it was getting interesting. In my friend's case, he was taken in (as I was) by all the famous figures and what they might have been like (and what they might say). The two young women, I'm guessing, didn't know the references. They didn't know who Scott and Zelda, Cole, and maybe even Ernest were. Or didn't care.
Which is an important truth in this kind of movie filled with references. Like a lot of post-modern art, it's only good for insiders. Unlike Allen's "Zelig" (a far more inventive and zany and complicated film, if imperfect, too), the references here are mostly for an older cultured crowd. There are hints of his "The Purple Rose in Cairo" as well, a fantasy to another world, a seemingly (or actually) better one, but that's a brilliant movie filled with pathos. "Midnight in Paris" is an extended trick, a one-liner, and as fun as it is, keep at least some of your expectations slim.