Karl Malden once said, "People have told me that I came to this industry at its Golden Age. But when I was there, it was just an age." If Malden had lived to see Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris (2011), about a Hollywood screenwriter unappreciative of the age in which he's living, he might have nodded in stern agreement.
Midnight in Paris is one of the trickiest movies I've ever had to review. It's tremendously entertaining, full of creativity, it's splendidly acted and it's the kind of movie that is easily called great. Not since his invigorating Match Point (2005) has Woody Allen made a movie this interesting, and -- because of that -- I feel tempted to embrace it with arms wide open. What I'll try to do in this review is explain the movie's shortcomings while still recommending it without question.
Being an on-again, off-again Woody Allen fan who's only seen about nine or ten of the director's films, I always go into every one of Allen's films these days with some skepticism. Because Allen has tried to make at least one movie every year in his 40+ career, his films often feel derivative of one other -- he has this tendency to recycle the same plots and characters in each successive film. My favorite Allen films have always been the ones that can be distinguished individually: Sleeper (1973), Annie Hall (1977), Interiors (1978), Manhattan (1979) and Match Point. From what I've seen, many of his other films, while enjoyable, also suffer from redunancy as well as an overreliance on caricatures. This latest film comes close to breaking tradition, but not quite.
The movie certainly delivers the goods. Owen Wilson makes for the perfect stand-in for the director as Gil Pender, a Hollywood hack who's sick of the Beverly Hills lifestyle: like Allen himself, he has an intense dislike for sunshine-infested cities like Los Angeles and is understandably none too pleased when his fiancee (Rachel McAdams) keeps talking about moving to Miami.
No, Paris is where it's at for Gil: the architecture is beautiful, the art is astonishing, and when it rains in the city, it's better to walk the streets than take a cab. This is where Gil seeks inspiration -- the inspiration to finally write something that will signify his transition from a hack screenwriter to an accomplished novelist. Like Mary Beth Hurt's Joey in Interiors, he knows there's an artist buried beneath his exterior -- he just hasn't yet found the inspiration necessary to spill his true feelings out onto a manuscript.
The scenes with Gil [spoilers ahead] on his midnight walks during a Paris vacation, venturing off into his own fantasy world, are the best things about Midnight in Paris. It is here that Allen confounds us by taking the movie to an entirely different level, as a darkened carriage begins taking Gil every night to a world beyond his creative dreams. He meets the ghosts of his literary heroes: F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston) and Zelda (Alison Pill), who are just as star-crossed as the stories say they were; Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), who is happy to tell Gil exactly what he's doing right and wrong with his unfinished novel; a rhinoceros-obsessed Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody); the luminous Adriana (Marion Cotillard), and others. My favorites of Gil's meetings are the ones in which he provides inspiration to the artists themselves; for example; it is implied that he is the one who suggests to Hemingway (Corey Stoll) that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the root to all great American literature. Or that he is the one who suggests to Luis Bunuel (Adrien de Van) a particular premise for a movie that may one day serve as the inspiration for The Exterminating Angel (1962).
Such individual moments are what make Midnight in Paris a feast for literature scholars and -- in the case of Bunuel -- film scholars. What mars these moments from truly making Midnight in Paris the great movie it could have been is the film's villains, all of whom have been recycled from Allen's previous efforts into tired old clones here. As Gil's fiancee, Rachel McAdams is merely embodying every woman Allen has ever held a grudge against for not supporting his art. Gil's parents-in-law (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy) are portrayed here as thick-skulled Tea Partiers; this is simply Allen making a cheap shot at the Republican Party, and I say that as a liberal who wishes he would incorporate such political commentary into a movie where it's more appropriate. Perhaps most tiresome of all is Michael Sheen's Paul, who -- like Diane Keaton's Mary in Manhattan -- is the dreaded "pseudointellectual", or the kind of unforgiving art critic whom Allen has always hated with a passion. In 1979, such a character felt fresh in Allen's cinema; by 2011, it's gotten a little old.
Even if Allen's overreliance on caricatures gets a little bothersome, it's really just a minor pebble in the shoe -- it doesn't stop the movie from being a grand entertainment. I laughed and smiled all the way through Midnight in Paris, because it did something that Allen hasn't done for a long time: it put me in another world. For a little over an hour and a half, I wanted to do exactly what Gil did: to stay with those literary giants and never want to come back to reality.
There was one small moment at the end of the movie that caught my attention: Gil's claim that among the other literary giants he's met in his fantasy world over the past few days, one of them was "Faulkner at a dinner party." He is, of course, talking about William Faulkner, and yet Allen never includes such a meeting anywhere in the film. Why is this? Maybe because Gil might be making the whole thing up: it's inconceivable to believe that Faulkner would ever have wanted to leave his comfort zone in Mississippi for a few nights in Paris. Or maybe it's because Faulkner, like Gil, was yet another "Hollywood hack" who sought artistic evolution in a transition from cinema to literature. Maybe "Faulkner" -- in this movie -- is actually Gil Pender.
Runtime: 100 minutes. Rated PG-13 for some sexual references and smoking.
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