User Reviews

Woody Allen's latest is beautifully written and a charming story that belongs in the top ten of his all-time greats. From the opening montage of lush, picturesque Parisian scenes the film is a love letter to the city of lights. Owen Wilson is perfectly cast as Gil Pender a Hollywood writer who has penned his first novel about a man who owns a nostalgia shop. Throughout his stay in Paris he hearkens back to the iconic characters who once roamed its winding cobblestone streets.

For everyone who sometimes ponders how life would be in another time, this film through whimsical storytelling and pure fantasy transports us. Perhaps that elusive world does not really exist or we are never truly content in whatever station we reside. Gil is enraptured with discovering the bistros where Ernest Hemmingway once wrote or the idea of living in garret with a sky light.

His fiancé played by Rachel McAdams who adroitly depicts a character both shallow and blasé and content to listen to the pseudo-intellectual musings of her onetime flame. To discuss the plot much further and divulge the magic twist would be a shame.

Midnight in Paris is a gourmet meal of delectably charming and playful scenes. Adrian Brody is riotous as a surreal artist and Kathy Bates deftly evokes a wise and famous writer. A character in the film remarks of seeing a movie but, she cannot recall what it was about or who was in it, not so with Midnight in Paris. It is a sweet, endearing and thought provoking film that will whisk you away into a sublime magical world.

While I'm sure some moviegoers did find this film enchanting, I think the greater majority of critics and viewers who claim it's a masterpiece are just afraid to admit that a film that name-drops so many intellectuals is just not very good. For a film whose list of characters includes some of the greatest minds of the early twentieth century, "Midnight in Paris" has little to say about the creative process or inspiration.

Maybe I've just gotten sick of Woody Allen's gimmick. Every film he makes includes the same list of players: the shrill wife / girlfriend, the overbearing other man / father, the nebbishy Allen stand-in (played this time by Owen Wilson, who makes a valiant, stuttering effort but is far too likable and easygoing a screen presence to really come off as neurotic and quirky), the ravishing young girl who finds the nebbish irresistible. And every film he makes includes terrific actors reciting their lines as if they're at the script's first table read.

Possible spoiler territory: Allen starts the film with a five-minute travelogue of nice places to visit in Paris, then introduces us to characters we'd never be able to stomach in real life. They have affairs and spend $18,000 on chairs and attend wine-drinking parties. We meet Gil and his fiancée, whose engagement is a complete mystery, and the fiancée's father, who must be evil because he's Republican. After watching these people amble around Paris for a while, we join Gil as he journeys back in time somehow to meet the artists he claims as personal heroes.

Many episodes of "Doctor Who" deal with time travel better than this film does. I'm not saying this to score a cheap point: The Vincent van Gogh episode from season 5, for example, introduces us to a world-famous artist as a brilliant but troubled thinker who has passion and ideas he struggles to express, and whose work in turn is shown inspiring those in the future.

Not so here. Gil seems to take no inspiration whatsoever from this amazing blessing, responding to his ability to travel through time with what can only be described as nonchalance. He encounters Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, and other writers we all read in college. Here's where I began to find the name-dropping irritating. These are CliffNotes versions of these great thinkers. Hemingway is brash. Zelda Fitzgerald is loony. Gertrude Stein is heavyset. We get it. What does this movie have to say about their work, their influence, their passion? What draws them together and makes their work vital?

Certainly we don't find out by watching Gil. At first, he's kinda happy to show Stein his novel, but then once he meets Marion Cotillard as a Lost Generation groupie, he shifts his ambition to sleeping with Marion Cotillard. I can't blame him, but I have no idea what the movie's statement becomes at this point. Something involving nostalgia, but even Gil admits that it's not a very compelling epiphany. Big spoiler: This amazing time-traveling adventure of self-discovery ends up not with Gil reinvigorated and pursuing his dream, but deciding to hang around in Paris because it's pretty in the rain, and meeting a nice hot young girl who likes Paris because it's pretty in the rain. What I'm trying to say is: Shallow movie.

To its credit, this movie did make me question, at about the 75th verse of "Let's Fall in Love," why Hemingway didn't punch Cole Porter in the jaw.

Many of the reviews of "Midnight in Paris" describe it as return to form for Woody Allen. We've all heard that many times before but I was still persuaded to see it as I hadn't seen one of his movies in years.

I did enjoy the movie though it hardly a classic. It begins with a title sequence featuring views of Paris, often in the rain, that reminded me of the beginning of "Manhattan".

The movie is about an American screenwriter, played by Owen Wilson, who is in Paris with his fiancée, played by Rachel McAdams. He is trying to write a novel, feeling he is wasting his time making easy money from writing movie scripts. He is a sentimental soul. He loves Paris but imagines it would have been ideal to live there in the 1920's with the likes of Picasso and Hemingway. His fiancée is only there for the pre-wedding shopping with her mother and thinks he should be delighted to have such a lucrative career.

His wish comes true when, as he walks back to the hotel alone one night, he is magically transported back to 1920's Paris and finds himself socialising with his artistic heroes. He meets and falls for a French model played by Marion Cotillard and starts to return every night to see her and get advice on his novel from the likes of Gertrude Stein. Allen populates the movie with as many famous artists of the period as possible – Dali, Bunuel, Man Ray.

He is convinced that he doesn't want to return to his old life, only to find that his new love hates the 1920's and imagines that life must have been so much better in Paris during "La Belle Epoque" when Gaugin and Lautrec were around.

This leads to a conclusion where the moral is pretty clear – Even if times were better in times past (and maybe they weren't) you still have to make the most of the times you are living in.

Owen Wilson is well cast as the confused writer. The beatnik persona he has in most of movies his perfect here. McAdams is wasted a bit in the one-dimensional character of his rather unpleasant fiancée. Cotillard is lovely and superb as the world-weary model. As usual with Allen's movies there are plenty of cameos. Adrien Brody's over the top Dali is especially memorable.

I'm sure I missed most of the literary and artistic references in the movie but this didn't stop me from enjoying this well written and beautifully filmed movie.

In an interview with L.A. Weekly, Woody Allen said, "The human predicament is so tragic and so awful that, short of an act of magic, we're doomed." Given his questionable view of the human condition, one wonders what the word "magic" means to him. There is little indication of it in his latest film, Midnight in Paris, a love letter to an imagined Paris in the 1920s. Set to the music of Sidney Bechet, the film opens with a 3 1/2 minute montage of Paris by cinematographer Darius Khondji's that is little more than a travelogue showing the usual tourist sights rather than the true Paris beyond the Eiffel Tower and the five-star hotels that Mr. Allen seems so enamored with - street vendors, bookshops, cheese, bread, wine, and pastry shops, outdoor cafés on the Left Bank, and quaint streets loaded with charm - the Paris of the Parisians.

As the film begins, we hear disembodied voices chattering away over the credits. It takes a few minutes to find out that we are listening to an engaged couple, Gil (Owen Wilson), a hack screen writer turned novelist and his shrill fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) talking about plans for their wedding. They are visiting Paris at the behest of their wealthy parents, businessman John (Kurt Fuller), who Allen lets us know right away is a right-wing Tea Partier, and his charmless wife, Helen (Mimi Kennedy), whose interests seem to lie in spending thousands of dollars for antique furniture. Almost immediately we can sense that the engaged couple may not be right for each other.

Inez is always on schedule, making plans and demanding that Gil go along with her every whim. Gil, on the other hand, (at first anyway) is adjustable, willing to go along to get along, not a good beginning for a marriage. As if we did not have enough of insufferably shallow characters, however, (Allen's desultory persona is there in spirit), the director throws in old friends of Inez, Carol (Nina Arianda) and Paul (Michael Sheen), her pedant of a husband, who Inez used to have a relationship with. It is not a mystery why, after a few failed attempts at socialization and sightseeing, Gil insists on being alone to take walks at night to get his so-called creative juices flowing.

The conceit of the film is that Gil, while out walking at midnight, is picked up by an antique cab and enters a time warp, traveling back to Paris as it was in the Twenties, presumably an invigorating and exciting time to be alive when ex-patriot Americans and Europeans interacted with innovative artists, writers, and musicians in a Bohemian atmosphere. With an "Oh gee, Oh gosh, Oh golly" expression on his face, Gil meets and hangs out with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill), Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Cole Porter (Yves Heck), Pablo Picasso (Marial Di Fonzo Bo), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody) Luis Bunuel (Adrien de Van), all shown together like the director was testing the audience to "Name that Tune". Naturally, they are all so fascinated with the exotic Gil.

What could have been a wondrous and entrancing experience becomes a stupefying cliché in Allen's hands. The 1920 artists are mostly one-dimensional caricatures delivering "clever" dialogue without spontaneity or wit, except for Stoll's lively discussion with Gil, a scene that begins to show promise for the film's direction but is soon dropped. With some exception, most of the characters resemble the cardboard cutouts from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Hemingway, the macho man, talks about his war exploits and challenges Gil to a boxing match, Dali pounds his chest shouting "I am Dali! Dali!, Picasso feuds with his lovers and so forth on into the night. Meanwhile, Gil becomes smitten with Picasso's lover, the entrancing Adrianna (Marian Cotillard) and makes his return every night at midnight in the same vintage car.

Gertrude Stein agrees to read and comment on Gil's novel about a nostalgia shop. What else would she do with her time? The film gives the impression that life in that era was one big party with important artists never doing any work, never feeling lonely and depressed, and never seeking the quiet places, suitable for reflection and serious thinking. Of course, Adrianna isn't satisfied with the glorious Twenties and travels with Gil further back in time to the "Belle Époque" of the 90s. If all of this sounds superficial and dull rather than full of mystery and fun, it's because it is. Allen has nothing meaningful to say about the human condition, witness his philosophy from Match Point that posits that life is all about luck and little else.

His facile message here is that we should appreciate our present circumstances rather than long for something unattainable, (especially if we live in the lap of luxury as do most of Allen's characters). This is a worthy if banal message but it is lost on Gil whose actions on returning to present time negate whatever value the message might have offered. Traveling to a distant time should have a calming effect such as in Rod Serling's Twilight Zone episode from Season 1 called "A Stop at Willoughby" where a train stops in 1888, allowing a harried businessman to experience an illuminated world filled with simplicity and serenity, qualities nowhere to be found in Midnight in Paris, a film about as magical as shopping at Walmart.