Movie Review: Midnight in Paris (2011, Directed by Woody Allen)

As I wander around great American cities, I am often filled with a vague sense that I am somehow walking on the shoulders of past giants. Strolling through Greenwich Village about a year ago, I couldn’t help but construct an imaginary conversation between Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsburg, and myself at some subterranean coffee shop. Walking across the Midway Plaisance on the University of Chicago campus just yesterday, I was struck with the vibrant sights and sounds of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, all in my mind’s eye and ear, of course. I believe my tendency to romanticize the past is shared by many. This suspicion is given credence by Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, the most emotionally satisfying film he has made in some time.

Owen Wilson plays Gil, a Hollywood screenwriter with novelistic aspirations. As is often the case in Allen’s work, the protagonist finds himself in a creative and personal funk. He is engaged to Inez, a beautiful, yet relentlessly dull, daughter of an oil businessman. While visiting Paris, Gil becomes painfully aware of how insipid his life is, especially when cast against the backdrop of the romantic French city. Through a plot turn reminiscent of The Purple Rose of Cairo, Gil finds himself whisked back to the Paris of the 1920s, a time when such towering artists as Hemingway, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein walked the Parisian streets. The protagonist becomes involved in the lives of these intellectual giants, experiencing their philosophical discussions, romantic entanglements, and personal struggles firsthand. He falls for Adriana (Marion Cotillard), Picasso’s current beautiful, young mistress. As Gil immerses himself more and more into the culture of the Jazz Age, the modern world seems increasingly mundane.

Although this description might make Midnight in Paris seem like a sentimental nostalgia trip, it’s much more thematically complicated than this. While Allen clearly has a passion for the era of high artistic Modernism and is living vicariously through his main character, the film’s message has more to do with the present. In a profound scene near the film’s end, Gil has the realization that every generation longs for the vitality of an oft-imagined past. While it’s beneficial to look over one’s shoulder for inspiration, one is not truly living if one isn’t looking for the beauty and magic of the here and now.

One of this movie’s most distinct pleasures is enjoying the subtle performances from the skilled actors. While it would be so tempting to portray such heavyweights as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Salvador Dali via an over-the-top, larger-than-life approach, the players manage to inject these performances with a perfect dose of subtle humanity. Yes, we are watching Ernest Hemingway on the screen. Because Allen and company avoid obvious clichés, though, we get the sense that we see Hemingway as he might have existed, not as he has become in legend.

Woody Allen has been dutifully churning out film after film, year after year. Watching a new Allen film is often a bit of a chore, since it’s almost universally agreed that his best work is behind him. Midnight in Paris, though, represents a huge exception to this perceived rule. I want to avoid falling into the trap that ensnares Owen Wilson’s character. Rather than merely longing for some imagined golden age of Allen films from the past, I want to see the beauty and truth of those being made now. His latest effort makes this exercise extremely easy.