Midnight in Paris Reviews

As Midnight in Paris begins, one wishes that Allen would stop it with the exact same font, jazz music intro, and, for once, try something just a tiny bit different for his opening credits. Then comes the postcard ready montage of Parisian hotspots, and you’re almost ready to write the whole thing as another travelogue with dull characters. But something funny happens in these first few minutes. There’s a shot of a lily-filled lake and way in the back enters two people having a discussion about Paris and its history as artistic hotspot. The scene is framed and shot with a painterly outlook, we barely notice the two people for a very long time. The opulence of natural beauty swallowing up the entirety human sentiment, the scene is perfect, succinct, beautiful.

The incredibly well-acted ensemble cast sees Owen Wilson as the head of the cast, it’s his aspiring writer who wanders off into the past and allows for the magical realism to take place. There is no logic, no reason given as to why or how these events are able to happen. And the film is actually all the better for that. To give a reason as to why this modern screenwriter with daydreams of becoming a good novelist who expatriated to Paris meets these titans of the artistic, film, and literary worlds would doom it to literal-minded science-fiction. Think of this as a spiritual cousin to Purple Rose of Cairo.

Wilson really surprised me. I had all but given up on him as an actor, believing that the days of The Royal Tenenbaums long behind him. That he had given up trying to find more challenging, artistic material and had instead decided to coast on his innate likeability to star in a long succession of brain-dead comedies and inert rom-coms. But here he seems engaged, enthusiastic about the material and the character that he just helps to sweep you up in the film. (The less said about the roles Rachel McAdams, Kurt Fuller, Mimi Kennedy, and Michael Sheen are stuck with the better. Allen’s penchant for creating god-awful elitist, pseudo-bourgeois upper class monstrosities rears its ugly head once for them. They play their roles well, and are thankfully are small portion of the movie.)

But the true reason to see the film is the parade of towering figureheads from the 1920s – Hemingway, Buñuel, the Fitzgeralds, Picasso, Stein, and so on. And while they are represented as quick sketches of their most defining traits, Hemingway speaks in formal but hyper-masculine prose for example, they are all highly entertaining. Adrien Brody’s cameo as Salvador Dalí lingers in the imagination because of his humor and grace in the small cameo. And Marion Cotillard as Adriana cements her reputation as both one of the greatest working actresses, and one of the few actresses who took her Oscar win as a chance to not coast on easy roles, but to find unique material to work with. She, as always, is master of subtlety and grace in her role, projecting warmth and sensuality in equal measure.

Woody Allen, as far as I am concerned, is an artistic treasure. Even if I don’t like his films, I’m happy to have seen them simply because it means that he is still working outside of the studio system to follow his muse and creating his own unique stories. I’m unsure if Midnight in Paris will go down as one of his best. All I know is that I felt like he had created a movie specifically for me. Thank you Mr. Allen.

Well, here we are again with yet another colourful and enlightening romantic-comedy from Woody Allen but hasn’t given us a film that has fulfilled the beauty and delight from previous successes - Annie Hall, Manhattan and Hannah And Her Sisters. However, having said that you’d know almost exactly what to expect with almost every single Woody Allen romantic-comedy, he achieves another breakthrough in his career as Midnight In Paris takes us on a daydream-like adventure through Paris and becomes his greatest film in years!


The city of Paris is perhaps one of the most common film-location choices and over the years, has made its mark as glistening sunshine within the film industry and the world of Hollywood, which we have witnessed in films such as Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, two of the three in the Trois Couleurs aka Three Colours trilogy and amongst others. Within the first 5 minutes of the film, we are taken into the beauty of Paris as there is just footage of the most attracted sites within the city, and are introduced into the colourful nature that leads into the story. So, as the film progresses, the film provides not only the beautiful settings of Paris, but also the personal effect it has on the characters and audiences watching.


In addition, Midnight In Paris represents other particular forms of beauty as it has enchanting and enlightening continuous music that almost tells the story, and it is a very colourful story with dazzling cinematography and art direction. There is only one flawed issue that could be quite crucial and affective for other viewers, and that is Midnight In Paris isn’t your traditional hilarious laugh-out-loud comedy and is rom-coms that happens most of the time. However, due to the positive aspects of production within the film, it makes up for excluding laugh-out-loud humour by making it still enlightening and colourful enough for its viewers.


Midnight In Paris consists of a strong ensemble cast – mostly American actors in a French city, but there are still some French actors. Leading the pack for Woody Allen’s latest romantic-comedy is Owen Wilson, truly an actor who you either love or you hate. Although, having never been a huge admirer of the man, he has admittedly delivered some good performances in most recent films. In all honesty, his performance as Gill is quite possibly his greatest performance yet as he provides a performance that rather easy-going and inspiring about self-discovery and you want out of your life. In fact, it has opened up a whole new discovery about Owen Wilson as an actor – he can be serious in his roles with either a film director who’s passionate about his/her projects or but in a comedy just for entertainment, he doesn’t always impress. As a result of his impressive performance, he deserves (yes, deserves) his Golden Globe nomination.


Rachel McAdams is mostly recognised as the girl from The Notebook and Mean Girls, so she has already gained the hearts of audiences who love romantic dramas and comedies. McAdams portrays somebody that isn’t so familiar with what she has previously done. Inez is an argumentative, shallow and a rather hateful young woman, who acts rather dominant on occasions, but she did deliver a satisfying performance but it isn’t one of her most memorable. Academy Award winning French actress Marion Cotillard appears Adriana, the mistress of Pablo Picasso, who Gil meets and is instantly attracted to. Kathy Bates portrayed wise and famous American writer, Gertrude Stein, who was in fact a real-life person who lived in France throughout the majority of her life and lived to the age of 72. Adrien Brody makes a cameo appearance as Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí, who was also a real-life person in the early to mid 20th century.


Overall, Midnight In Paris is a short and sweet romantic comedy that is easily one of Woody Allen’s greatest achievements in many years and for this reason, it has become a well-deserved Oscar contender for a numerous number of awards. It is perhaps focused more on the beautiful settings side than anything else and it cannot really be re-lived, so it is a film that is better only seeing once because you can just experience and travel along with the characters and there will be no experience like any other.

I really enjoy Woody's movies more when he is just directing, even though Owen personified Woody's typical character, I feel more confortable without the real Woody on screen (he really makes me anxious with his anxious New York stereotypical).
Loved the script and the homage to so many wonderful artists from the past and present that he made, nonetheless it didn't "wowed" me. :/
Maybe I was just expecting too much from this one.

Eu tinha grandes expectativas sobre esse filme. Não, não por causa da direção de Woody Allen. A verdade encontra-se no título, ou melhor, na segunda parte do título. Aquele nome. Aquele nome! Paris! Nunca conheci essa cidade, mas romantizo tanto com ela que ás vezes tenho até medo de serem expectativas frustradas.
Quanto ao filme...
Apaixonei-me, literalmente, de primeira. Aquelas primeiras cenas acompanhadas ao fundo pelo Jazz (que, para os meus companheiros de cinema, estava virando uma tortura) fizeram-me viajar com Allen pela cidade do amor, poesia, luz e todos os outros nomes que ela recebe. Talvez seja por eu já sonhar com isso, não sei.
Pude dividir com Gil (Owen Wilson), Allen, também, não só o amor por Paris mas o seu desejo de ter vivido em uma época passada, no seu caso, a década de 20, ou Idade de Ouro. Concordo com a ideia dele sobre ter nascido atrasado. Gostaria de poder dividir mais traços da história. Também gostaria de indicar esse filme para muitas pessoas. Mas, infelizmente, sendo sincera: é um filme próprio para amantes. Amantes de Paris, amantes do cinema, amantes da bela arte. Talvez nem precise apreciar Paris, acredito. Um filme bastante leve e com uma trilha sonora "gostosa".
A ideia brasileira de colocarem um cartaz remetendo a uma comédia romântica talvez não tenha sido boa, a propósito.

Woody Allen's latest film is the cinematic equivalent of going to dinner at an ultra-fancy and elegant restaurant at which finger foods are the only items on the menu; there may be a certain charm to the classiness of the whole experience and it may be visually appealing, but there's no doubt that it won't offer the substantial satisfaction and nourishment that you're craving. MIDNIGHT IN PARIS has a cute little premise and it's at times nice to look at, but golly, it's one wildly superficial movie. Not once does it go beneath the surface in its examination of love and nostalgia, and what's worse is that this is coming from a director who HAS succeeded at offering profound explorations of those subjects, which inevitably makes one wonder whether the superficiality here is on purpose, or if Allen has simply turned lazy.

Gil (Owen Wilson) and Inez (Rachel McAdams) are two Americans who are engaged to be married. Gil leads a financially comfortable life, thanks to the fact that he's been working as a screenwriter for Hollywood films over the last few years. But he feels that his true passion may be for novel-writing, and he finds that, in the U.S., he can't quite get the inspiration he needs to write his book. So, when Inez's parents decide to go on vacation to Paris, Gil decides that he and Inez should join them on the trip, thinking that perhaps the enchanting European city will help his prose start flowing. Once they're in Paris, Gil indeed seems to get a spurt of inspiration, but much to his chagrin, he and Inez soon run into another couple: Paul (Michael Sheen) and Carol (Nina Arianda). Gil is clearly hesitant to spend any time with this other couple, and we soon find out why: Paul is one of those pretentious know-it-alls, and the fact that Inez seems to be so impressed by Paul would render anyone jealous. One evening, the two couples plan to go out dancing, but Gil is, of course, not excited at all about the idea, so he stays behind. As he's walking the streets of Paris alone, an old car passes by and its passengers encourage him to get in. He accepts, and as it turns out, the car is actually a portal that takes Gil back in time to Paris in the 1920s.

If you asked me to reduce the experience of MIDNIGHT IN PARIS to a few words, I would say that it's an exercise in name-dropping. You see, as soon as Gil enters the 1920s, he runs into the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dali and T.S. Eliot. Sounds wonderful, doesn't it? It's too bad that the execution isn't wonderful. MIDNIGHT IN PARIS consists of Gil having incredibly lackluster conversations about life and love with these artists from the past. One must imagine that Allen admires at least some of the artists that he has made characters in his film, but in all seriousness, if he thinks that these people were as bland conversationalists as he depicts them here, then I wonder what he really thinks of their work. The most severe problem here comes with Corey Stoll's performance as Hemingway - his baritone line delivery is at times dreadful, almost as though he were reading from a teleprompter, and the actor's portrait of Hemingway as this brooding guy with an eternal blank stare feels awfully exaggerated. I was watching the film with a large audience, and I did hear occasional reactions from them, but I soon realized that the reactions were along the lines of "Oooh, look! It's Gertrude Stein!", and that there wasn't any sort of response to the film's wit or its character dynamics, because both of those things are hit-and-miss at best.

Throughout the film, the protagonist goes back and forth from the present to the 1920s, and I wish I could say that the scenes in the present that depict Gil and Inez's devolving relationship at least make the film better, but I can't. Quite the contrary, actually. The whole dynamic with Gil's jealousy of Inez's admiration of Paul quickly turns cartoonish. There is a scene at a museum in which Paul is spewing information about the pieces of art they're looking at, and as soon as Gil tries to intervene to offer equally insightful information, Inez immediately interrupts him to say: "Shh! I'm trying to listen to what Paul has to say." Childish script-writing at its finest, and the fact that it's from Woody Allen's pen makes it all the more disconcerting. Oh, and we're helpfully told early on in the film that Inez's parents are right-wing Republicans that we need to immediately hate and dismiss as close-minded - I'm as liberal as can be, but as a cinephile, I can't help getting pissed off when a film picks such an easy target and portrays it so one-dimensionally. All this kept making me constantly want the film to go back to the 1920s scenes, because vapid as they are, at least they aren't as painfully forced as the scenes that try to capture Gil and Inez's failing relationship.

The film does begin with a really nice long montage featuring several locations of the titular city. This is deceptive, though, because it may give the viewer the impression that MIDNIGHT IN PARIS will function as a love letter to the French capital, but the truth is that, once that montage is over, we see less of Paris' vistas than we do of Owen Wilson's face smiling and smirking. Wilson's performance isn't bad by any means, though - this is different material than he's had to handle before, and I'll concede that there are scenes in which he could've gone over-the-top and correctly goes for subtlety instead. Rachel McAdams was apparently asked to simply act as shrill as possible, and if that was the goal, then I suppose she deserves all the credit in the world, though it's of no help, especially in many of the ridiculous hard-to-believe scenes that depict the problems faced by the film's main couple.

If there's something positive to be said about MIDNIGHT IN PARIS is that its ultimate moral is at least interesting. The film believes that, no matter what happens, one will always have a certain level of dissatisfaction with one's "present" and that it's inevitable that there will be a yearning for the past. When we think about the past, we often only think of the good things, so it's easy to delude oneself into thinking that the past was better, even though it probably had just as many shitty moments as the present does. I also give credit to the film for being humble enough to tell us that this is only "a minor insight" and not trying to pretend as though it has made some sort of discovery. If MIDNIGHT IN PARIS had offered this message through an intelligent script and with interesting character dynamics, I'd easily call the film a winner.

Of course, the other good thing to be said about MIDNIGHT IN PARIS is that it's at least better than a lot of the utterly mediocre stuff that Allen has put out in the last couple of years. When compared to something as pretentious as MELINDA & MELINDA, as lame as SCOOP, and as wildly unfunny as last year's lifeless YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER, this film seems much better, but of course, that doesn't mean it's good. Back in 2005, MATCH POINT offered some hope that perhaps the writer/director's brilliance was coming back - that film's script was so nuanced, its performances so on the nose and its dramatic/suspenseful core so well-built, that one couldn't be faulted for suddenly developing high expectations. It's too bad. I'm still waiting to see whether he'll ever offer us something as great as CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS again, but I'm growing more and more skeptical of it ever happening.

If you're interested in seeing a film that offers a profound exploration of the themes of life and love, whilst photographing a beautiful European city, I heartily recommend BEFORE SUNRISE, which is a true masterpiece of dialogue, emotion and acting. On the other hand, when stripped down to its essentials, MIDNIGHT IN PARIS is nothing but a somewhat good-looking exercise in name-dropping. I'm sorry to say it like this, but I find it dispiriting to hear someone say they think a movie is cool because "OMG! Pablo Picasso was actually a character in the movie!" Anyone can sit down and make a movie that features artists from olden times as characters. The question is whether you can make the whole thing organic and interesting and give it a dramatic flair that will make the film worth seeing for at least two or three reasons other than the presence of those particular characters. That's certainly not what happens in MIDNIGHT IN PARIS. To add insult to injury, but without spoiling anything, the film's final few minutes are incredibly contrived. It's been a while since I've rolled my eyes so manifestly as soon as the credits started rolling.