Movie Review: Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen puts out a movie a year, a fact that puts him at an immediate disadvantage. While most of his films have good central ideas, they tend to get clouded by mediocre details due to what I can only imagine to be grossly insufficient time and effort. “Midnight In Paris,” however, is an example of what Allen can do when he takes the time to really polish a script and work out the nuances. This film is filled with several familiar Allen tropes, but here he makes them work. This may be because the story is such a perfect vehicle for his style.

“Midnight” is beautifully shot and really low-key, never careening into the melodrama or high-camp comedy that has been his downfall in the past. Rather, “Midnight” feels like a comfortable, leisurely stroll through the very city of its setting. What a great surprise for the early Summer season.

The story is a simple examination of screenwriter-turned-struggling-novelist Gil (Owen Wilson) and his overwhelming nostalgia for Paris in the 1920's. I won't spoil the gentle, delightful surprise of the actual plot-line, but I will tell you that Gil is confronted by the failure of nostalgia to capture the realities of the past. The story begins with Gil on vacation with his fiance, Inez (Rachel McAdams), and her parents. All he wants to do is wander the streets in the rain and imagine how amazing it must have been to live in that city 80 years ago, spending all one's time creating art. Inez and her parents are a bit put off by this artistic, romantic view (how could you get an honest job to support that behavior?!) and are openly critical of him in response.

Allen has spoken at length about his own admiration and nostalgia for Paris. This personal admiration for the City of Lights is lovingly expressed in “Midnight.” He fills the screen with gorgeous postcard-ready views of Paris that immediately feel both familiar and highly idealized. These vignettes feel like living, breathing representations of photographs Allen might have taken over the last forty years. They're just missing the people who were with him at the time. You can imagine their phantoms crossing through the frames as Allen filters gentle jazz over the soundtrack. The old-fashioned montage opening works in an even deeper way as well by establishing a mood of nostalgic fantasy right away and setting the stage for the rest of the film.

If I have one problem with the film it would be the characterization of Inez and her parents. They are cliched, rich Americans in a city they have no appreciation for. They openly resent the French people and their politics, only seem interested in spending obscene amounts of money on garish furniture and antiques, and are a little too free with their opinions.

They are brash, disrespectful, argumentative, inattentive and conceited. While this does a great job of showing how Americans are viewed by the rest of the world (we're not all that bad, honest!), it also leaves the audience wondering why Gil would be with these people in the first place. He lacks a convincing connection with Inez and he has nothing in common with her folks. They feel like arbitrary conflict devices, not real people. Inez's friends, Paul and Carol (Michael Sheen and Nina Arianda) don't fare much better as the smug, know-it-all, pseudo-intellectual friends. Paul will make your teeth fall out in agitation, and Carol merely stands next to him and worships his vainglorious lectures on art, philosophy and everything else in the world.

Aside from these simple missteps, the film has a glorious quality that makes you forget the outside world for a lovely 90 minutes. It's not too serious and not too silly and feels as if it were plucked from some collective-consciousness ether of romantic daydreams. By the end, the audience is confronted with the hard truth: grass may look greener in that painting from the “golden age” we yearn for, but true contentment can only be attained by letting go of our nostalgia and truly enjoying the present. Despite the fact that this film is an overt love-letter to the romantic soul of the truly nostalgic, Allen also gently reminds us to live in the present and only take the occasional midnight ride into the past.