Midnight in Paris [Review by Haus]

Midnight in Paris is Woody Allen’s latest, and one of his finest in a long time.

I’ll admit, I went into this film unenthusiastic. I had no idea at all what it was about — just that it was the newest Woody Allen picture, and starred Owen Wilson. In Paris. At midnight. I’ve spent a few midnights in Paris and it wouldn’t take 100 minutes to recount what happened. (In case that sounds risque, nothing happened.)

Make no mistake: Allen cheats on New York in this picture, big time. Whole hog. His traditional opening montage is an untweaked ode to the subtle beauty of Paris — by day, in rain, by night. And as Owen Wilson ambles through the city channeling Woody and spellbound by Parisian mystique, we’re treated to about as transparent a portrayal of the filmmaker’s own views as is likely possible absent a straight up Woody monologue. (He’s moved past those now.)

But Owen/Woody is openly and unabashedly in love with a past version of Paris — with the 1920s version, when writers and intellectuals bantered in smoky cafes, themselves of course mere flapper-age echoes of the Victorian-Bohemian absinthe-soaked likes of Flaubert, Zola and Lautrec.

The story in brief:  Screenwriter turned struggling novelist Owen Wilson — who is in Paris with his fiancee and her parents — boards an old Peugeot at midnight and travels back in time to the Paris of his dreams. He chills with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Salvador Dali, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and so on. He takes these trips nightly, losing himself in this magical past reality as his current world steadily cracks and strains. If this sounds a tad formulaic, don’t worry — just  add Allen’s neurotic worrywart dialogue, a typically-conflicted love story, and a splendid supporting cast of okay-who’s-next figures from the past and it’s transformed — it’s magic! — into a brilliant and fantastic romp, the secret dream of every lit-geek starfucker. The 1920s Parisian party scenes alone are worth the price of admission. It’s a place (and time) that’s well worth a visit.

To pull something a little deeper out of this setup, Allen toys briefly with nesting these time portals, traveling further back in time as each successive layer of characters waxes nostalgic for a prior age. He’s right, of course — today never seems like a Golden Age. It’s too real, too immediate, too crowded with mediocrity — as Marion Cotillard’s character says, it’s too “noisy.”  Though Allen winds up beating us over the head with this a little, it’s not enough to detract from the straight-to-the-vein shot of pleasure from a playful and well-executed high-arch period piece. Put bluntly, this is what movies are for.

Of course, Allen also pokes fun at period pieces and nostalgia in general — the “rosy recollection” problem — by shoehorning just about every interesting literary and artistic figure of the time period into Wilson’s visits. Even if he did travel back to the 1920s, of course Wilson wouldn’t somehow be airdropped into that one smoky party thick with all the intelligentsia du jour. It’s not the 1920s that is so alluring — nor, in the end, is it Paris itself — but rather the people who populate it. But Allen’s point that the present never seems quite good enough is well taken, and leaves us to think on some interesting questions.

Allen’s been a bit hit or miss of late, but Owen Wilson nails Allen perfectly, McAdams is watchable as the ever-so-wrong-for-him fiancee, and the supporting cast is typically memorable. This film is upbeat and strangely un-melancholy for Woody. But there’s a much simpler reason to see it: Any film that manages to drop jabs at Tea Partiers (best quip: “crypto-fascist airhead zombies”) while also giving us a rum-drunk Hemingway picking fights in a carnival is a win in my book.

HAUS VERDICT: Fabulous. Would that they all could be such fun.

See what the other half thinks: Parsi’s view.