Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
7/4/11
We've talked about it before,
but movies for adult audiences have their backs against the wall:
just about all major national releases are now genre fare targeted at teens
or at least adults who remember their subject matter from when they were
teens, and most of the most interesting flicks on what used to be the art
house circuit rarely make it past the first level of their would-be platform
releases. But the movies are fighting back by facing some hard realities:
people aren't going to pay anymore just to watch good actors heartbreakingly
plum the depths of the human condition. You can argue that they never
did, and that the Miramax era caused filmmakers to fall so in love with
the total artistic freedom to not entertain anyone that they forgot how
the adult-skewing blockbusters of the past were actually high concept in
their own way. In the last 6 months, we've seen films like The
Fighter, True Grit and Black
Swan turn the tide precisely by playing the studios' game in their
own way, and now even Woody Allen is getting in on the act. Midnight
in Paris is unmistakably the Annie Hall auteur's work, but it's
also a cleverly constructed summer movie for the art house set, sending
its hero on a time-traveling adventure to meet the great artists of the
early 20th Century the same way the characters on the bigger screens at
the same multiplexes are getting to know robots, superheroes and talking
cars. Charming, funny, accessible and ultimately thoughtful, Paris
is just what people who hate summer movies are looking for: a summer
movie that rewards a liberal arts degree the way most reference your comic
book collection.
Gil (Owen Wilson) is a successful
Hollywood screenwriter, but the work brings him no joy. He really
pines to be a Great Novelist, and when the parents (Kurt Fuller & Mimi
Kennedy) of his fiance Inez (Rachel McAdams) invite them on a business
trip to Paris, he has a chance to reconnect with his artistic ambitions.
Inez is more interested in reconnecting with Paul (Michael Sheen), a boorish
would-be intellectual she thinks is a genius, and that gives Gil an excuse
to wander the streets of the city. During one such stroll, the clock
strikes midnight and a carriage pulls up beside him, the partygoers inside
beckoning him to join them. He does, and finds himself at a party
listening to some Cole Porter guy while chatting up a Zelda (Allison Pill)
and Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston). Yes, THAT Zelda and Scott,
and they introduce him to Earnest Hemmingway (Corey Stoll), who in turn
takes him to meet Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), who's chatting up her friend
Pablo Picasso (Marcel Di Fonzo Bo). The next day, it's right back
to 2011, and the continuing drudgery of Inez's circle of friends and family
with whom he has nothing in common. Another midnight stroll and that
carriage takes him right back to 1920, where he meets Picasso's model and
mistress Adriana (Marion Cotillard), with whom he strikes immediate sparks.
Stein agrees to critique his work-in-progress novel, Hemmingway gives him
tips on women and in general, Gil finds the 20's to be so much more his
time than that nasty present. But is the era really his problem,
or the life he's chosen to live in it? When push comes to shove,
what decade will Gil choose?
Woody Allen's never been
known for his propulsive plots: the question of how Gil's traveling
back and forth is never addressed and the threat that Inez and her family
will discover how he's cheating on her with the past is played strictly
for laughs. The plot is really just an excuse for Midnight in
Paris to observe: the present day characters and their self-absorbed
rush from one appointment to the next, and the 1920's artists and their
fiery love of ideas and each other. Sure, you can't just pull up
a chair with the greatest writers of all time any day, but you can try
to find people who share your passions, rather than... well, Inez sure
is pretty, but McAdams is wonderfully unlikable in the role and makes you
wonder just what the heck Gil ever saw in her (he has a hilarious speech
on that very topic that sheds no light). And Sheen, who never gets
the credit he deserves for his amazing range, is utterly perfect as the
kind of guy who drives his fellow men insane with his need to drone on
endlessly about knowledge both real and imagined about any topic that comes
up. Fuller is his usual delightfully odious self, and he and Kennedy
leave no doubt how Inez ended up the way she is.
The icons of the 20’s are
an engaging group across the board, with Stoll making the biggest impression
as the incarnation of Hemmingway’s works. Reminding me very much
of the most iconic performances as Orson Welles (Christian McKay in Me
and Orson Welles and Vincent D’Onofrio in Ed Wood in particular),
Stoll makes the legendary writer the kind of iconic original people would
gladly allow to hold court all day long, and Allen does a great job of
giving him just what we’d want Hemmingway to say. Hiddleston and
Pill make great impressions and the Fitzgeralds, her work in particular
important because she’s the first person Gil meets in 1920 and makes such
a vibrant contrast to the boorish folk we’ve spend all our time with in
2011. Bates does a wonderful job of making some very flowery prose
sound like her own spontaneous thoughts, and Adrien Brody and Adrien de
Van have delightful cameos as Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, to whose surrealist
sensibilities Gil’s story doesn’t sound the least bit strange.
Cotillard does a great job
of perching Adriana right where the story needs her to be: so charming
and full of life that we’d root for Gil to end up with her, but at the
same time sharing his self-destructive need for a world somewhere, anywhere
other than where she is. And it’s here that Allen actually has something
really interesting to say: Gil thinks he’s a prisoner of his times,
but he’s really a prisoner of his choices, and even they only constrain
him as long as he allows them to. It’s a surprisingly hopeful and
upbeat film, and really benefits from the inspired casting of Wilson.
As much as any man who’s occupied Allen’s shoes since he moved first away
from the leading roles in his movies and then from appearing in them at
all, he’s got the mix of treating everything like the end of the world
while not seeming to entirely understand it down pat. And while Wilson’s
spent most of his career playing oblivious idiots, that vaguely unfocused
quality he has works as well if not better as an intellectual.
Midnight in Paris
could have been underwritten by the Parisian Chamber of Commerce, so aggressive
and thorough a case does it make for the glories of the French Capital.
But the fantasy European setting only adds spice to a pretty solid package
for the kind of escapist moviegoers who’ve read a lot of Hemmingway and
Fitzgerald and know their Cole Porter inside and out. And for those
of us who’re not nearly as well-read as we might wish we were, it’s still
a fun, light-on-its-feet story about the power of passion and knowing who
you are. Allen’s been setting and shooting most of his movies in
Europe the last few years because of the struggle all like-minded filmmakers
are facing to gain US funding, but Midnight in Paris is exactly
the kind of crowd-pleaser that can help turn that around. Stick and
move, Woody. Stick and move. |
