The Obvious Star is Paris!

Rating: 6/10 (23 December 2011)

MIDNIGHT IN Paris sounds good on paper and looks in ads. The film opens with a long sequence of views of the sights in Paris - no actors, no story, just the breathtaking magnificence of the City of Light. For this viewer that section i the most rewarding of the entire film. Once the film starts Woody Allen imposes an improbable story with stereotype characters and with a few notable exceptions, it gets stuck in its own cuteness.
VERY briefly screenwriter wannabe novelist Gil (Owen Wilson playing Owen Wilson) and his bride to be Inez (Rachel McAdams) are in Paris with Inez' parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy) who in turn are on a business trip. Inez is a bore: Gil wants adventure. As Inez sees the touristy places with her friends, the hideously boring pedantic Paul (Michael Sheen) and his flaky partner Carol (Nina Arianda), Gil escapes to walk the streets of Paris and fall in love with the history and the magic of the city. At the stoke of midnight he is picked up by an elegant car and is taken to the 1920s where he encounters Cole Porter (Yves Heck), Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), F Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston) and his Zelda (Allison Pill), Josephine Baker (Sonia Rolland), Alice B. Toklas (Thérèse Bourou-Rubinsztein) and Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo) and his current flame Adriana (Marion Cotillard who seems to have phoned in her performance), Djuna Barnes (Emmanelle Uzan), Salvador Dalí (Adrien Brody - in probably the only convincing performance in the film), Man Ray (Tom Cordier), Luis Buñuel (Adrien de Van), TS Eliot (David Lowe) - in other words all the famous artists of the 1920s. Gil is captivated by the opportunity to share his work with these greats, though he finds it difficult to understand time travel. He falls for Adriana who in turn wishes she could live in the time of Le Belle Epoque so of course Gil and Adriana time travel again meeting Henri Matisse (Yves-Antoine Spoto), Toulesse-Lautrec (Vincent Menjou Cortes), Paul Gauguin (Olivier Rabourdin), and Edgar Degas (François Rostain) at Maxim's. Gil by day grows less enamored with Inez and by night more infatuated by Adriana and in the end there is a permanent schism between Gil and Inez and we are left with the moral 'Don't wish to live in another time than your own.'
Sounds like a run through of famous names? It is. Wilson is inept at romantic comedy, and Woody Allen's script is fairly boring for Allen's works. BUT Paris is Gorgeous - and that is enough!
Grady Harp