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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.
