This movie includes Gertrude Stein; therefore, it MUST be good!

Rating: 3/10 (8 October 2011)

While I'm sure some moviegoers did find this film enchanting, I think the greater majority of critics and viewers who claim it's a masterpiece are just afraid to admit that a film that name-drops so many intellectuals is just not very good. For a film whose list of characters includes some of the greatest minds of the early twentieth century, "Midnight in Paris" has little to say about the creative process or inspiration.
Maybe I've just gotten sick of Woody Allen's gimmick. Every film he makes includes the same list of players: the shrill wife / girlfriend, the overbearing other man / father, the nebbishy Allen stand-in (played this time by Owen Wilson, who makes a valiant, stuttering effort but is far too likable and easygoing a screen presence to really come off as neurotic and quirky), the ravishing young girl who finds the nebbish irresistible. And every film he makes includes terrific actors reciting their lines as if they're at the script's first table read.
Possible spoiler territory: Allen starts the film with a five-minute travelogue of nice places to visit in Paris, then introduces us to characters we'd never be able to stomach in real life. They have affairs and spend $18,000 on chairs and attend wine-drinking parties. We meet Gil and his fiancée, whose engagement is a complete mystery, and the fiancée's father, who must be evil because he's Republican. After watching these people amble around Paris for a while, we join Gil as he journeys back in time somehow to meet the artists he claims as personal heroes.
Many episodes of "Doctor Who" deal with time travel better than this film does. I'm not saying this to score a cheap point: The Vincent van Gogh episode from season 5, for example, introduces us to a world-famous artist as a brilliant but troubled thinker who has passion and ideas he struggles to express, and whose work in turn is shown inspiring those in the future.
Not so here. Gil seems to take no inspiration whatsoever from this amazing blessing, responding to his ability to travel through time with what can only be described as nonchalance. He encounters Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, and other writers we all read in college. Here's where I began to find the name-dropping irritating. These are CliffNotes versions of these great thinkers. Hemingway is brash. Zelda Fitzgerald is loony. Gertrude Stein is heavyset. We get it. What does this movie have to say about their work, their influence, their passion? What draws them together and makes their work vital?
Certainly we don't find out by watching Gil. At first, he's kinda happy to show Stein his novel, but then once he meets Marion Cotillard as a Lost Generation groupie, he shifts his ambition to sleeping with Marion Cotillard. I can't blame him, but I have no idea what the movie's statement becomes at this point. Something involving nostalgia, but even Gil admits that it's not a very compelling epiphany. Big spoiler: This amazing time-traveling adventure of self-discovery ends up not with Gil reinvigorated and pursuing his dream, but deciding to hang around in Paris because it's pretty in the rain, and meeting a nice hot young girl who likes Paris because it's pretty in the rain. What I'm trying to say is: Shallow movie.
To its credit, this movie did make me question, at about the 75th verse of "Let's Fall in Love," why Hemingway didn't punch Cole Porter in the jaw.