Starring: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates, Michael Sheen, Adrien Brody, Tom Hiddleston, Carla Bruni
Rated: PG-13 for some sexual references and smoking
When early reviews of Woody Allen's new highly acclaimed movie Midnight In Paris were released, critics praised it as a "love letter to Paris." I would have said it a little differently; it's a love letter to art. The film follows Owen Wilson as Woody Allen, I mean, Gil Pender, a screenwriter and engaged man who is not convinced he wants to be either. In fact, if it were up to him, he and his fiancé would move to Paris instead of just visit, and live the life of a struggling novelist, but his controlling fiancé (Rachel McAdams) has little interest in understanding the art that Paris provides and that Gil loves. Everything changes, however, when Gil finds a way to travel back in time to Paris of the 1920s every night. There, he meets the chorus of famous artists who inhabited that time period, from Ernest Hemmingway, to F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, to Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), to Salvador Dali (a terrific Adrien Brody), to Pablo Picasso. It's really Allen's chance to nerd out, giving us insights to the historical artists, bringing their personalities to life, making them human, yet making them contemporaries of Gil. It's charming to see Gil explain to Zelda that Scott really is in love with her, or to Luis Bunel about his future film The Exterminating Angel. Like Gil, we're all seduced by the nostalgia of the age and the characters, and we both become more attached to this historical time period than our present reality.
However, Allen uses this attachment to work his artistic magic. He shows us how much of our glorification of the past is because of the dissatisfaction with our own lives; a truly brilliant point. No matter who you are, we seem to forget that "the good old days" were as unfulfilling, unenlightening, and uninspiring as our modern era, because our lives aren't satisfied by Earthly fixations. Despite his wisdom, Allen fails to recognize the true remedy and, instead, embraces pure existentialism as the answer. (He also fails to understand the value of relationships and has an annoyingly blatant political bias.) However, Midnight in Paris is one of Allen's best films, simply because I connected so well with the characters, art, setting, and beliefs of the film. Had I not known who Gauguin or Dali were, it wouldn't have had that same power. But, because you know their work, the film shows how their art was the communication of their inner man, putting meaning behind the words and depth behind the paint. The movie simply deepened my love for art and humanity. Paris, je t’aime.
Watch the pitiful, lack-luster trailer for this wonderful movie here:
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