“You can fool me, but you can’t fool Hemingway!”
The H-Bomb: Gil (Owen Wilson) is a hack Hollywood screenwriter vacationing in Paris with his fiancé, Inez (Rachel McAdams), and her family. Gil, unsatisfied with his life and career, romantically views 1920‘s Paris as the “Golden Age“ of creativity, and yearns to take up permanent residence there and write a novel. Inez, who as we come to find is self-centered, controlling, and for lack of a better word, bitchy, will of course hear none of it. After all, Gil’s career would afford her a very comfortable life in Malibu.
Late one evening, a slightly drunken Gil is walking back to his hotel when the clock chimes midnight, and a vintage car pulls up. The passengers invite Gil inside, and the next thing he knows, he’s at some party where everyone is dressed funny in period costumes and a Cole Porter song is being performed by a guy who bears an uncanny resemblance to Cole Porter. Then, Gil meets a couple who introduce themselves as Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald… wait… as in…? Yep.
This is about the time it starts to dawn on Gil that something ain’t quite right. After a night of decadent festivities, he finds himself in a bar with Ernest Hemingway (a great Corey Stoll), who offers to pass his novel along to Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates). Gil is about ready to shit himself… is he dreaming all this? Apparently not, as every night, he waits at that street corner, and every night, a car picks him up and whisks him back to the 20’s, where he has face to face meetings with everyone from Picasso, to Bunuel, to Dali, to T.S. Eliot, drinking it up and partying like it‘s 1929.
The nights are having an undeniably positive effect on Gil, as he feels truly inspired creatively, attacking his novel vigorously during the day, while often blowing off Inez and her family’s pre-planned activities. He’s alive in a way he never has been before. Then, on one of Gil’s nightly adventures into the past, he meets a girl, Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a girlfriend of Picasso‘s. As you can imagine, there’s chemistry at first sight, and over the course of several nights, their feelings for each other begin to develop. Gil finds that he wants to be with her, as they truly seem like kindred spirits, but how can he do that when during the day, he has a life (and fiance), in the present?
“Midnight in Paris” is pretty much what you would expect from writer/director Woody Allen; a light-as-a-feather romantic comedy, with a dash of fantasy, and a considerable amount of clever wit and sophistication. It is, save for a the occasional line of dialogue, never exactly laugh out loud funny, but it’s consistently amusing, with many references to artists of the past that will get a decent chuckle out of people savvy enough to appreciate them. It’s doesn’t rise to the level of Allen’s classics from the past, though it is heads and shoulders above most of his more recent pictures.
Allen makes a statement with this film about how people are often unsatisfied with the present they live in, and often romanticize an era of the past that was “better.” As Gil comes to find, even though he thinks of the 20’s as the time in which he belongs, the people who actually live in that era find it as uninspired as he does the 2000’s, and they themselves have their own bygone eras in which they would have rather lived. Allen’s ultimate point being that even though we may view the past through rose tinted glasses, that things always seemed better back in the day, the here and now is what we must accept and live with, and the future is what we should be looking to. Wow, a rom com with an intelligent, viable theme? Only in a Woody Allen film!
As for the acting, again, this is a Woody Allen film, and he fills it with famous faces in roles large and small alike, and they’re all terrific. Wilson plays the Allen surrogate flawlessly, giving Gil the perfect mix of charisma, geekiness, and awkwardness. He doesn’t exactly have Allen’s neurotic energy, but he makes up for it by bringing a dorky charm of his own.
Cotillard has the alluring yet likeable French babe thing down pat, and McAdams is a little too convincing as the pushy, spoiled bitch Inez. Michael Sheen is great as Paul, a pompous know-it-all who starts putting the moves on Inez. But, it was Stoll who stole the show as Hemingway. He’s the Hemingway I always imagined; brilliant, boorish, with an ego bigger than the Eiffel Tower. Too bad the “Law & Order” gig didn’t pan out, maybe this will open some doors for him.
Overall, if you’re tired of cowboys, aliens, robots in disguise, wizards, and comic book heroes, then “Midnight in Paris” is the pleasant, refreshing “counter programming” summer movie for you. Some may bitch that the pace is too leisurely, but I didn’t think so. Some may moan that the time travel is never explained, but it really didn’t need to be. I’d say this is the perfect date movie for cinephiles, and serves as proof that while Allen may be getting up there in years, he hasn’t lost his touch… not entirely, at least.
