Midnight in Paris, Nostalgia, Didn't Owen Wilson Try to Kill Himself?

Midnight In Paris

You know when stepping into a basic Woody Allen film that you're entering a particular sort of universe. It'll be charming and whimsical, there will be a slew of colorful supporting characters played by the best actors in the business. The bad guys will be pretentious blowhards, the good guys will be confused overthinkers speed-talking their way through a crisis. And a few minutes before the credits, there will be a small epiphany. Not a world-shattering realization. Just a little one, merely there to assure you that the movie you just sat through wasn't just silly fun.

It's a solid formula for many of his movies (Match Point only slightly excepted), and Midnight In Paris seems the perfect vehicle. Owen Wilson plays Gil, a frustrated writer trying to turn from hack screen writing to real literature. He has an overbearing fiancée who is probably having an affair with the pretentious blowhard du jour (a very funny Michael Sheen, who gets all the pedantic cadences just right). They are on vacation in Paris, which leads Gil on a wave of Lost Generation nostalgia, which doesn't interest his girlfriend in the slightest. Oh, and if he sits on a particular corner at midnight, a taxi pulls up and takes him to 1924.

This is where Woody gets to be Woody: having his sad-sack protagonist wander through the streets and parties of 1920s Paris, rubbing elbows with many of the great artistic and literary figures of the time, listening first-hand to Cole Porter, giving advice to Louis Buñuel, doing the Charleston with Djuna Barnes. The fact that all of these fabulous figures are played by equally fabulous actors turns the movie into a sort of guessing game: "Who will show up next? T. S. Eliot? Adrien Brody... as... Dali?" And this is where the strength of the movie lies, in this nostalgic wish-fulfillment. If you went back to 1924, what would you say to F. Scott when he complains about Zelda? What would you say to Gertrude Stein's critique of your novel? 

The nostalgia scenes are the strength, certainly not the predictable and uninspired scenes in the present, which proceed like clockwork, every snag and relationship argument telegraphed from the beginning. And certainly not Owen Wilson's character, who, try as he might, is never much more than the shoulder we have to look over to see what we want to see. The Paris of the roaring '20s is too interesting to have the Paris of today be so boring, and so the movie sags whenever we are not in the presence of Hemingway et al.

So Midnight In Paris is a slight pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless (Adrien Brody as the bombastic Dali is almost worth the price of admission itself.) The epiphany moment, which concerns nostalgia, is particularly underwhelming, since it's not only obvious, but also in a way contrary to the spirit of the movie. We all know nostalgia is unproductive and illusory, but then again so are movies. And movies can fun and useful too. This one is more fun than useful, but fun nonetheless.