Midnight in Paris is an exceptional walk through time. I saw this the weekend it opened but I didn’t write the review before now.
Midnight in Paris (Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Kurt Fuller, Mimi Kennedy, Michael Sheen) – I have to admit that I meet famous people in my dreams. It’s true. A couple times a week, I tell Julie that I dreamt about talking to celebrities, politicians, and professional athletes. Can you tell what I spend my days watching (news shows, movies, and sports)? What a premise for a movie! Well, Woody Allen beat me to it. Midnight in Paris is vintage Woody. It takes an everyday schlep (usually himself) and puts him (or her) in an extraordinary situation. In this case, it’s Gil (Owen Wilson), a mediocre film writer who is vacationing with his fiancé, Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her parents in Paris. Gil was not having a good time. The parents (played by veteran character actors Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy) dislike him and Rachel constantly criticizes him in front of her friends [played by Nina Arianda and Michael Sheen (who, for once, was not Tony Blair). Sheen’s character is a seeming fountain of historical information about Paris and everything else. Or he’s a blowhard. And while Gil knows more than Inez gives him credit for (she is constantly shushing him), he knows he doesn’t like being led by the hand. He wants to see the real Paris, the one that is the most beautiful “in the rain.”
So one night he takes a walk around midnight. He is suddenly confronted by a car whose occupants open the door and welcome him to go a party. The next thing we know, he is cavorting with the most famous people of what Gil believes is Paris’ “golden era.” Each night, he walks to the same place, is greeted by the car, and heads off to meet not only American authors, poets, composers and artists who lived in Paris at various points in the last century [Cole Porter, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Alice B. Toklas, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and his Zelda] but also Salvador Dali (Oscar winner Adrien Brody), Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and more. As the audience, we are voyeurs enjoying a bygone era while Gil converses merrily with all of them, living his vacation to Paris in a singular way while Inez, her parents and the friends enjoy theirs with Gil as a lost soul.
Woody often writes his best work as a dialogue with his audience, almost oblivious to the plights of his other characters. His is a voice that perhaps no other screenwriter has found. It is very intimate with the audience while treating the other characters as players and afterthoughts. There is a reason he has been nominated for 14 screenwriting Academy Awards, winning two. That doesn’t even count the six he has been nominated as Best Director (winning one for Annie Hall) and one for Best Actor (also Annie Hall). In case you think his best work is behind him, don’t bet on it. I’ll take the 75-year-old’s work in Midnight in Paris over almost any other modern-era screenwriter any day. Even if you think he is a jerk in his personal life, don’t boycott his work. It remains exceptional.