way, way too cute

Rating: 6/10 (13 April 2012)

With all the good reviews, I was expecting to like this film. Mostly it irritated me with its cuteness and shallowness.
For a start, it makes far too much of the beauty of Paris. Yes, the city is pretty, and the opening shots of postcard-like scenes were charming, in a postcard way. But when the film began to make much--and I do mean much--of the idea that the scenery of a city contributes to human happiness in an important way, it began to annoy. Are people happier in Paris and Rome and Vancouver than elsewhere? Really? You mean they're inevitably and quantitatively more miserable in Nepal, Kyoto, a fishing village in Newfoundland? No, in our hearts we know that happiness comes from other things, from love, family, satisfying work, freedom from tragedy (i.e. luck) and, most important of all, that elusive factor, inner contentment. The prettiness of our surroundings offers at most only fleeting moments of delight, all within the context of a much larger experience. Midnight in Paris present a shallow, tourist's appreciation of life in Paris.
When Gil, clearly incompatible with his fiancée, wanders over to a little music store, a woman walks out, young, pretty, they look at each other, they're obviously interested, they exchange a few words, they part, and we absolutely know that the movie will end with Gil leaving his fiancée and taking up with the French girl. Clunk. How dull.
The central conceit of going back in time to what was in Gil's mind a golden age has a certain charm, but Allen ruins it by hammering it into the ground, shoving onto the stage every damned famous writer and painter he could think of--the grossest kind of name-dropping, celebrity-watching. Oh, oh, look, there's Hemingway! There's Alice B. Toklas! Aha, Gaugin! My goodness, Toulouse-Lautrec! Really, it becomes quite tiresome.
The deep thinking of the film makes the point that every era looks back to some previous time which it regards as a golden age, before the vulgarity and ordinariness of the present. It's a nice thought, worth making. Yet it simply substitutes another escapist fantasy, namely, that one location, Paris, is a golden place, where life must be more vivid, more thrilling, in a word, happier. It's a shallow notion in a shallow film.