Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams in Midnight in Paris.
By Hap Erstein
Neil Simon, in his heyday, used to churn out a Broadway play every season, whether he really had a worthy idea for a play or not.
The same could be said of Woody Allen over the past decade – from 2000’s Small Time Crooks to last year’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger – he has written and directed a film each year, but they have largely been inconsequential trifles that feel tossed off.
Still, at 75, he remains a workaholic with a film in production or pre-production at all times. And his fans – a group to which I consider myself a charter member – live in the hope that he still has a Crimes and Misdemeanors or a Hannah and Her Sisters or even a Purple Rose of Cairo in him. Purple Rose particularly comes to mind, because that melodramatic comedy about the urge to leave one’s world behind for a chance at happiness in an alternate universe is essentially the same theme as in his latest release, Midnight in Paris, the Woodman’s most satisfying film in the past ten years.
Viewers of Allen’s films – or maybe it is just us critics – are always in search of autobiographical clues in even his more lightweight screenplays. So when we first meet Gil, a successful Hollywood writer who regrets not having penned a novel of substance, our antennae go up.
Curiously, since it has long been established that Allen can attract any actors he wants, he cast Owen Wilson to play his latest alter ego. And while he is not much of an actor, the fuzzy-headed aging surfer type does a very creditable job, adopting the unmistakable halting cadences that have been Allen’s signature since his stand-up comedy days in the 1960s.
Anyway, Gil is on vacation in Paris with his insufferably spoiled fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams) – yes, literature majors, score a point if you recall that Inez is a character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s “hell is other people” classic, No Exit. Gil is the sort of person who, feeling unsatisfied by his present life, yearns for the romance of a past era. And sure enough, while wandering the streets of Paris one night alone, a distant bell chimes midnight and a taxicab out of the 1920s turns the corner and stops at the curb in front of him.
Inside the cab are those celebrated denizens of the Jazz Age, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who implore Gil to join them as they go party-hopping. They introduce him to a somber Ernest Hemingway – Gil’s literary idol – who refuses Gil’s request to read and comment on his manuscript, but Papa does pass the tome on to Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) who has encouraging words for Gil.
When he tells Inez of his encounters, she is understandably dismissive, but he seeks out the cab the next night and returns to the ’20s, where he falls for Picasso’s mistress of the moment, the very French Adriana (Marion Cotillard), former lover of Braque and Modigliani.
Allen has a great deal of fun with these icons of the arts, conjuring up Man Ray, Luis Bunuel, T.S. Eliot and Dali (Adrien Brody) among others. As seen through Gil’s imagination, their speech patterns often reflect their work, as Hemingway talks in clipped, intense sentences and Dali talks with a surreal theatricality.
But beyond the fun, Midnight in Paris has a point to make about yearning for past, a message which elevates the film from boulevard comedy to something worth pondering and savoring. It is Allen’s notion that nostalgia is born of a dissatisfaction for life, a need to reach for something better. In the same way that Gil idealizes the ’20s, Adriana thinks that the “golden age’ must be the Belle Epoque of the 1890s. And perhaps, Gil suggests, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec regret not living in the Renaissance.
Like the best of Allen’s work, there is a dark underside to the comedy, though Midnight in Paris is so deft and airy, one can easily enjoy it without dealing with its pessimistic streak. Maybe it is just wishful thinking, but there are signs here that Allen has found his footing again. And who knows – maybe his golden age is still ahead of him.
MIDNIGHT IN PARIS. Director: Woody Allen; Starring: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Kurt Fuller, Adrien Brody, Kathy Bates. Distributor: Sony Pictures; Rating: PG-13. Opening this weekend at area theaters.