Those visiting Paris for the first time are often told that the best way to see the city is to just wander its streets, without a map, and without an agenda. You’re supposed to just let Paris take you where she will, and trust that the experience will be uniquely yours, and uniquely perfect. In Woody Allen’s new film Midnight in Paris Owen Wilson plays a Hollywood writer named Gil who would probably very much agree with this philosophy. The problem is, he’s visiting the city with his fiancé Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her insufferably American parents John (Kurt Fuller) and Wendy (Mimi Kennedy). They’re the type of people who take cabs from destination to destination. They don’t want to get lost or have to do the work of exploring. They haven’t come to Paris to experience the city; they’re here for business. Gil sees an urban environment as a work of art, with every street a different facet of its beauty. Inez and her family see an urban environment as a new place to shop.
As is usually the case with Woody Allen and the lead characters in his films, Woody seems to be in agreement with Gil. The film opens on a montage of Paris street scenes that goes on for so long and becomes so indulgent that it’s almost lewd. We get ideal, romanticized images of Paris locals, set to airy music, over and over again, and moving from day into night. It’s unabashed relishing of the aesthetics of the city, pure Paris porn, and it made me gush. Plus, it worked as a smooth transition into the film’s title card; you go from a day drinking in the visual pleasures of the Paris streets right into Midnight in Paris, whatever that entails. For Gil it represents a moment of solitude. The moment where he gets away from the shallow chattering of his fiancé, her family, her friends, and allows the charm and mysticism of Paris to envelope him and take him on a journey uniquely his own.
Gil is a Hollywood writer, but it’s for schlocky crap that he doesn’t feel proud of or fulfilled by. Earlier in his life he took a trip to Paris that inspired him to write. He wanted to stay there, do real writing, novels and whatnot; but he never went through with it. He stayed in California, wrote movies instead. He earns big paychecks, has a beautiful fiancé, but always wonders what might have been had he really took a stab at doing what he wanted, what he was sort of afraid of, what he was stimulated by. Inez and her family are content to spend their days wandering through shops, grazing product like a cow grazes grass. Whether or not their lives are the right fit for them never enters into their thoughts; they’ve got all of the stuff that they could ever want, of course their lives are the right fit. But Gil is different. Gil wishes that he was alive in the 20s, he wishes he could have been immersed in the artistic movement that produced writing greats like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Consequently, he’s writing a novel about a man who runs a shop that deals in kitschy relics from past eras. He spends his own time looking at old Cole Porter records while his fiancé and his mother-in-law-to-be price out ludicrously expensive furniture.
A crisis point comes with the introduction of Inez’s friend Paul (Michael Sheen) and his girlfriend Carol (Nina Arianda), who has a hilariously strange understanding of how to pronounce the French language. While Inez and her family are just typically bland and bourgeois, Paul is pretty insufferably pseudo intellectual. He insists on coloring every experience with his own obsessively accrued knowledge, which he thrusts upon people in a manner not unlike opening up a vein and spraying insecurity all over the room. Despite this, Inez indulges his egoism and puts value in his obnoxious fact stating, a situation that Gil can’t stand to endure, and which leads him to taking a midnight stroll through Paris’ streets while the other three make their way, probably via automobile, to some trendy dance club. It’s on this midnight stroll that Gil has a life changing experience that takes this movie places I never anticipated. A little lost and a little drunk, a disoriented Gil takes a moment to sit down at the foot of some stairs. As a nearby clock tower strikes midnight, an automobile straight out of the 20s rolls up the street and the inhabitants inside, dressed for a 20s themed party, beckon Gil to get in and join them. The party is a wild scene, flapper girls dance, Cole Porter music is played, literature is discussed. But something is amiss; doesn’t that guy playing music look a little too much like Cole Porter? And this couple introducing themselves as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, you don’t actually think? Before he knows it, Gil’s family trip to Paris has gone and gotten itself decidedly supernatural.
So, there you have it, I guess there isn’t a way to write a full review of this film without giving the secret away. Every night at midnight Gil goes out for a walk, and just as the clock strikes 12, the same car pulls up and takes him back in time to the roaring 20s. The
Années folles, a time when great writers like Fitzgerald and Hemmingway rubbed elbows in Paris with great artists like Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali; and Gil meets them all. He takes advice on being a man from Hemingway (Corey Stoll), he has Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) give him notes on his book, and he steals away Picasso’s (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo) girlfriend Adriana (Marion Cotillard). Seeing as I went into this film having no idea about the fantasy element of it’s plot, once all of the time travel stuff happened it was initially a jarring experience. I wasn’t certain if I was supposed to be taking what happened at face value as a magical occurrence, or whether I was supposed to be viewing it as some exaggerated fantasy that Gil had indulged himself in. But after a while it became clear that it didn’t matter. Woody introduces us to historical figure after historical figure, to the point where the whole thing becomes farcical. The writers and artists of the 20s are played for laughs; they’re plot devices and gags. The hows and whys of what Gil experiences aren’t really important. But, at the same time, Gil is always treated with respect, and as a real person. And so is the newfound objection of his affection, Adriana. Tonally, what this movie tries and, I think, manages to pull off is very strange; but everybody was so fun in their assigned roles that eventually I just gave in and went along with it.
The tipping point in my acceptance or rejection of the places this film went was Stoll’s portrayal of Hemingway. He is absolutely hysterical as the overtly manish writer, and laughing at his ridiculousness was what initially put me at ease. Stoll’s Hemingway speaks only in super dramatic, super brisk, Hemingway prose. Every bit of casual conversation that comes out of his mouth reads like an excerpt from one of his novels. He really sets the tone for how you’re supposed to react to these 20s sequences. While it appears that Gil actually is time traveling in some sort of real way, the place he’s going to reflects his idealized image of the 20s more so than it does any real recreation of what the era must have been like. Hemingway only talks about war and boxing and trips to Africa, Zelda Fitzgerald is an absolute caricature of the manic pixie dream girl, Gertrude Stein the perfect picture of matronly authority at the center of all the craziness. These characters appear as they do in Gil’s dreams; it’s just that in this film dream is reality. Mention should be given to Bates’ portrayal of Stein as well as Stoll’s as Hemingway. She is so natural and at home as the character that it feels like she’s been living as Gertrude Stein as long as there have been people on the Earth. She is at the same time wise and approachable. She’s a caretaker and a progressive. In order for the creative revolution that was happening in Paris during the 20s to take place it would have almost had to have a rock solid character like Bates’ Stein sitting at the center of things, holding it all together.
And if Gertrude Stein was the glue holding it all together, then Marion Cotillard’s Adriana is the light that brings Gil’s fantasy world to life. Cotillard is a stunning beauty. I’ve seen her in several things before, but never has she struck me quite like she did here. As a glowing young socialite and art groupie, she is just radiantly gorgeous. In this dress and in this environment, her presence is unparalleled when it comes to warmth and magnetism. She projects a sweetness and sincerity that seeps through the pores in her face, she cuts a figure as iconic as anything that came out of old Hollywood. As I was watching this film there was no doubt in my mind; Marion Cotillard belongs in the 20s. But, ironically, Adriana is a romantic who longs to live in a different era. While her natural environment serves as Gil’s dream life, she wishes that she had been able to live during The Belle Époque that took place toward the end of the 1800s. The pre-war optimism, the streetlights, the horse drawn carriages, they all exhibit a romanticism that Adriana longs for. In a way it makes her a perfect compliment to Gil’s character, the two dreamers living out of time with their heads in the past.
Eventually that sense of romanticism and nostalgia gets put to the test when a horse drawn carriage shows up in the 1920’s and takes Gil and Adriana back to the end of the 19th century. Suddenly, Midnight in Paris goes from being a whimsical farce dabbling in questions of idealism and nostalgia to a pointed message on the subject. We go from a film that feels like a carefree stroll to an Inception-esque dream within a dream mind game. For Adriana the experience is an exciting opportunity to live out a life long fantasy, for Gil it’s a chance to look at what he has been going through from the outside. The things Adriana and Gil learn on this journey and the choices they make because of them end up becoming pretty important in defining their characters and spelling out the message that the film has prepared for us. I was kind of disappointed that Woody took things as far as to have a specific opinion on the subject of rose-colored glasses and the past vs. the present. I would have left the answer to the question of why people always think the grass is always greener and whether or not it really is more open ended, but even on this subject Midnight in Paris doesn’t linger. We get a quick speech, a bite sized lesson, and then we’re swept away somewhere else.
Really, this is Gil’s movie completely, and anything else gets pushed by the wayside. The other characters pass in and out of his life and color his experiences, but nobody else gets a complete story. Life lessons and thematic material are flirted with, but they never get harped on or fully explored. Midnight in Paris is light, maybe even a bit vapid, but it’s airy, kinetically paced, and it leaves you wanting more. Rather than question his own sanity or try to investigate how it’s possible that he is traveling through time every night, Wilson’s Gil just faces it all with a casual, almost schlubby acceptance. You get the sense that Gil could have anything in the world thrown at him and he would meet it with a shrug of the shoulders and a little bit of a smirk. Largely, it’s Wilson’s on screen persona that makes this possible. When I picture other actors in this role, it would seem stupid that they weren’t completely freaking out at the idea of magical time stepping. Only Wilson, whose personality is so laid back it’s almost mystical, could approach this mind-blowing material with the bubbly excitement of a little kid getting a new toy and make it resonate as believable. And he sounds great delivering Woody’s dialogue as well. Not many people can play the lead role in a Woody Allen film and not end up sounding like they’re just doing an impression of the man. Wilson manages to take the words and give them his own personality, deliver them with his own rhythms. He manages to anchor a Woody Allen film, stay his own man, and remain true to the persona that he has crafted for himself over the years. This project wouldn’t have worked nearly as well without him in the role, and his seamless integration into the Woody Allen world is a big reason why this is the freshest feeling and best film that the director has made in quite a while.
Don’t imagine I’m saying this film is perfect, though. There are a couple missteps and a few promising elements that don’t get near enough exploration. At one point Gil tries to steal a pair of earrings from his fiancé to give to his new fling, and I thought the act was completely repulsive. It was a sleazy move that was disrespectful to both girls, and Gil does it without even giving it a moment’s thought. And the film never even seems to take a second to question the morality of the situation, either. I felt to me like it came really close to making Gil an unlikable protagonist, but before you can get too hung up on anything the focus is already moving on to something else. Rachel McAdams and the entire present day world in general are woefully misused in this film. She is way too good of an actress to be playing the nagging chore of a woman that she does here. She so blindly lives in her own world, oblivious of her significant other’s needs, that she’s practically the villain of the piece. There’s even a point where it’s revealed she might be having an affair that gets glanced over without a moment’s hesitation. But, again, it’s the constant motion that keeps you from getting hung up on any of the minor imperfections. Midnight in Paris does a lot of weird things, it goes a lot of weird places, and it’s always performing a dangerous balancing act with how much you are willing to accept from it. Better to get in and get out, maybe leaving a few things half-baked, rather than linger too long and burn everything to cinders. I would have liked to have known more about Gil and Inez’s relationship. I would have liked to have seen more happen between Gil and Inez’s dad, who is delightfully, stubbornly, the fish out of water American without ever making the bit seem tired or hacky, and who mistrusts Gil enough to send a private detective after him. Before you know it the promising detective angle gets dropped completely, and barely mentioned again other than for a gag. But that’s because Midnight in Paris doesn’t have time to linger, it has other things to get to, and they’re all so delightful that you find it hard to care. This movie isn’t an afternoon seminar taken at the Sorbonne; it’s a nighttime walk through the rain down the Boulevard Saint-Michel.
