I Still Love You, Netflix!* - Midnight in Paris

*Though I still occasionally hate you, too.

Escapism. That’s why we love movies, isn’t it? Sure, some of us want to be educated and enlightened when we watch a film, but do most people willingly decide to devote two hours of their valuable time just to learn something? No, we want to be entertained, damnit!

Woody Allen’s latest, Midnight in Paris, is a whimsical trifle of a film, gently sweeping the viewer up in nostalgia and fantasy. Owen Wilson plays Gil, a Hollywood screenwriting hack struggling to finish his first novel, who yearns to escape the film business and embrace the pure and noble life of an Ex-Pat writer in France, much like his literary heroes Hemingway and Fitzgerald. 

While vacationing in Paris with his high-strung fiancee Inez and her rather pretentious parents, Gil stumbles across a wrinkle in time while on a solitary midnight stroll that immerses him in 1920‘s Paris during the height of The Jazz Age. In a single whirlwind evening, Gil meets Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Pablo Picasso, as well as Picasso’s beautiful young muse, Adriana. Gil wakes up the next morning in present day Paris, back to deflecting underhanded remarks from Inez and her parents.

Gil finds that he is able to go back to The Jazz Age each night by returning to the same spot at midnight. As he spends more time with all of the famous artists of the era, and begins to fall in love with Adriana, he struggles with the dilemma of whether he should stay in the ’20’s or return to his real life in the present. It is this characteristic of history, how we tend to glorify the past while merely tolerating our current lives, that lies at the heart of the film.

I described this film as a “trifle” earlier in this review, and I don’t necessarily use that term here in a derogatory fashion. The dilemma Gil faces in the film does provoke some similar thought in the viewer, but this film is primarily a lighthearted take on the standard “What if?” scenario. Woody Allen knows his audience well, and this film is clearly intended for folks of his generation who have more tangible ties to that era, in terms of close family members who experienced it themselves. However, Owen Wilson’s reliable one-note “aw shucks” persona is a good fit for the character of Gil, and Allen’s decision to pair him with Rachel McAdams as Inez certainly appeals to a younger demographic who are fans of the film The Wedding Crashers.

While Marian Cotillard is delightful as Adriana, and Michael Sheen is quite humorous as a self-aggrandizing college professor and friend of Inez, I do think Allen was a bit too enthusiastic in his effort to include seemingly every famous artist of The Jazz Age, and I’m sure he had little difficulty casting those roles, as a laundry list of lesser-known actors show up to chew their share of scenery throughout the film (Corey Stoll stands out as Hemingway, whose exhausting intensity and endless rhetoric on the writer’s commitment to truth soon lose their amusing qualities). The soundtrack is the usual charming collection of vintage jazz and swing tunes that Allen faithfully includes in most of his films. And what would a Woody Allen film set in Paris be without plenty of visual nods to the city’s iconic architecture and teeming boulevards? The film even opens with an especially lengthy montage of the sights and sounds of “Gay Paris” that runs long past the usual amount of time allotted for a sequence of establishing shots. 

Midnight in Paris is an enjoyable film and a rather triumphant return to form for a director close to the end of a long and prestigious career. Allen assumes you’ll get past the natural inclination to pick apart some major implausibilities in the narrative (i.e. time travel, and why all of these famous artists are in Paris at the same time, and why they’re all so immediately welcoming to Gil and so interested in his novel), and if you’re willing to do so, then it’s a great way to escape for a couple hours.