Midnight in Paris

[This WILL contain spoilers.  A lot of them. You have been warned. Short review: Two thumbs up.  Four stars.  I plan to see it again, which makes it among the better Allen movies for me.]

When he is on his game, no one captures wistful befuddlement better than Woody Allen.  And with his latest movie, Midnight in Paris, he is on his game.  Totally.

The movie concerns a screenwriter and would be novelist, Gil, played by Owen Wilson (in an uncharacteristically restrained performance) who has come to Paris with his fiancee, Inez. He is in love with Paris, its romance and grandeur; a love which Inez -- and her parents -- most emphatically do not share.

Gil longs to have been in Paris in the 20s.  He believes that life was somehow better then, more interesting, less mundane.  And, magically, his wish comes true, at, naturally, midnight.  Midnight in Paris is a fantasy story, albeit with substance at its core.

In his sojourns to the 20s, where he returns night after night, he meets the notables of the era:  Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, and a whole parade of literary and art figures.  (Part of the charm of the movie is trying to identify the characters before they are named:  Look, Salvador Dali! Alice B. Toklas!)  He lives his fantasy fully: at the suggestion of Hemingway, he hands his unfinished novel, which he sees as redemption from his life as a hack Hollywood screenwriter, to Gertrude Stein for review.

At Stein's, he meets a woman named Adriana, played by the incredibly beautiful Marion Cotillard, who has a much less romanticized view of her surroundings than Gil.  She is far, far different from his shallow and materialistic fiancee.  A woman who has slept around the artistic community -- Modigliani, Braque, and when we first meet her she is Pablo Picasso's lover and model -- she longs for what she sees as a gentler, more elegant time: La Belle Epoque, Paris of the 1880s and 90s. At one point the movie becomes an onion: each generation longs for the splendor of a past one.

It is when she gets her wish, and she and Gil are transported back to Maxim's in the 19th century, that Gil realizes the basic flaw in not only her fantasy but his own. Everybody longs for the past, he tells her, but that doesn't mean it is a better place.  Each era has its flaws.  He returns to his own, settling instead for living in the Paris of the new millennium.  (Without his annoying fiancee.)

A lot of reviewers have called this movie a "trifle."  Not in a bad way, but in a light and sweet way.  The movie is that.  It is also funny, thoughtful, and layered.

The only false notes are the characters of Inez, her parents, and her friends Carol and Michael, who are portrayed pretty much as stereotypical ugly Americans. It is not that they are touristy -- Gil himself is described that way -- but that they are unbelievably crass and materialistic. There is nothing wrong with being an American in Paris, the movie seems to say, as long as you are respectful about the city, which is a rather simplistic view of the world.  Inez and Gil are so very different, in fact, you begin to wonder how they could have ever ended up together in the first place.  Paris after your engagement is rather far along the road to discover that your bride-to-be is an empty-headed, mean-spirited harpy.  The characters of Carol and Paul are likewise drawn in very broad strokes.*

I would have rather had more nuanced side characters -- the people surrounding Gil in 2010 seem so much less alive than the ones he meets in the 1920s, which is a shame.  It would have made a very good movie a great movie had Allen chosen to make Gil's compatriots in contemporary Paris more interesting.  It would have made the choice he made to return to the present seem more like one undertaken out of desire than out of a belief that it is the right thing to do and that the past is not always what it seems.

Of all the Woody Allen movies I've seen, to me this  most closely resembles Radio Days, an under-appreciated gem from the 1980s. Both have a wistful nostalgia for time and place: Queens in the 1940s, or Paris in the 20s.  Unlike Radio Days, however, the place and time are not filtered through the protagonist's memory but through his imagination: a subtle difference but an important one. Memory, for all its faults, it a much more reliable source of information.  In some sense, there is a question as to whether Gil's time travel is really happening or whether it only exists in his head.

I think Roger Ebert sums up nicely how I feel about this movie (as he so often does):

Either you connect with it or not. I'm wearying of movies that are for "everybody" — which means, nobody in particular. "Midnight in Paris" is for me, in particular, and that's just fine with moi.

*I would take exception to the terribly pedantic character of Paul, played by the good-as-usual Michael Sheen, except that I've been like that at times.  It made me squirm.