Of the many films I've skipped reviewing in the past few years, nothing seems more odd to me than not reviewing Woody Allen. Considering that I think Allen is one of our great directors (certainly the greatest American, living), and that I've liked a string of his recent work, it's just... odd.
Midnight in Paris continues a phase which I suspect will be called "the late, or European, period" in his works. Based in Europe, Allen has focused, in recent years on shooting outside America with stories based in Europe's great cities. These are also the films where he has simply taken himself out of the mix as an actor, no longer devising lead, or even cameo, roles for himself.
From Match Point to Vicky Cristina Barcelona to You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, Allen has evolved into a director entirely in his own element, no longer self consciously aping greats like Bergman. He no longer drifts between serious (his heavy dramas) and lightweight (his giddy comedies); the films are distinct, their tones individual, but Allen's ability to fuse comedy and drama into each story has become precise. These, really, are the stories he seems meant to have told.
Midnight in Paris puts Allen back in his most romatic settings (think the end of Everyone Says I Love You), drifting between reality and fantasy (think Purple Rose of Cairo), longing nostagically for the past (Radio Days). Midnight in Paris, though, is refreshing, complete, spare and surprisingly direct. And its message is simple: stop longing for the past. Accept your present, and make the most of it.
Owen Wilson plays Gil, a lost soul of a screenwriter who is in the final stages of his first novel, in Paris with his girlfriend Inez and her parents, a wealthy businessman and his shallow materialistic wife. Though Gil and Inez are superficially close, their relationship is undermined by pointed barbs the two sling back and forth, which only deepen when the couple are joined by friends of Inez, Paul and Carol, intellectual poseurs.
Gil, seeking an escape, and overwhelmed by the beauty of Paris, wanders the streets one night and at midnight a car pulls up and takes him to... Paris in the twenties. Suddenly, he is interacting with Scott and Zelda and Earnest and Pablo and some matador who I should probably know as well (he sure is purdy). Gil brings his novel for Gertrude Stein to read. And along the way he meets Adriana, Picasso's mistress.
Like Gil and his romance for Paris in the twenties, Adriana longs for Paris of the Belle Epoque. Gil, like many men, finds her luminous (she is, after all, played by Marion Cotillard at her glowing best), but it's clear their real connection is on the intellectual level of shared ideas and ideals. Can their love survive across time? Don't be absurd... or surreal - did I mention we run into Bunuel, Dali, and Man Ray?
As with the best of Allen's ensemble work, Midnight in Paris is littered with opportunities for star cameos, and if Kathy Bates doesn't entirely shine as Gertrude Stein, Corey Stoll as Hemingway and Alsion Pill and Colin Hiddleston as the Fitzgeralds more than make up for it. Then there's Adrien Brody's smooth, surreal take on Dali and Adrien Du Van's small, shy Bunuel. In the modern day world, Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy shine as shallow parents to even shallower Inez.
Owen Wilson is doing a Woody Allen stand in part here, and he does with a kind of aplomb he'd seemed to have lost in recent years - shambling, easygoing, but reminding us that he's a man with a heart and a mind. McAdams, too, in a part that could easily fall into cariacature or mean spiritedness, does her usual smashing job of mixing likable elements with her hard edges. As for Cotillard... what the hell. She makes grown men melt. I am certainly not immune. And, as with her glorious turn as Piaf, Cotillard was made for twenties haute couture while remaining appealingly down to Earth.
Allen's sly mix of humor (ugly Americans have never seemed uglier) and sentiment suggests a mellowing in his old age, but an increased precision for the moments and etails that speak volumes. I noticed it most in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but here it is laser-like, surgical sharp (his can't resist gag, where Gil explains to a young Bunuel the plot of "The Discrete Charm of The Bourgoisie" is knowing and brilliant). Allen toys with a variety of messages and philosophies - his Hemingway quotes are spot-on, as are the surrealists - but in the end he offers a kind of existentialist idea of life both then and now: life is to be experienced. And it will be what you make it.
If this doesn't seem especially deep... it's not meant to be; Allen is, at heart, suspicious of a kind of intellectual superiority that substitutes knowingness for actual intelligence. Gil, in the end, figures out where and who he needs to be, because he doesn't dwell on what was but focuses on what is. And that's not the worst lesson to get from some old, purple prose.
Oooohhh....!!!!
Posted by: Jennifer | May 28, 2011 at 09:33 PM