Review of Midnight in Paris (2011) by Clarisesamuels — 23 Dec 2011

Midnight in Paris is fluffy and sweet, but like cotton candy, it is airy and somewhat lacking in substance. However, Owen Wilson's Gil is an original creation and actually outstrips all of Allen's previous incarnations in all his other films.

This is an new kind of character playing the Woody Allen persona. He's not a loser; he's rich and confident. He doesn't get cast aside by the woman he adores because she left him for someone who looks suspiciously like Warren Beatty; he's engaged to be married to the woman he loves, and he's on holiday in Paris, while his rich future in-laws go on a shopping spree to pay for the perfect wedding.

The endearing Brooklyn accent is gone because it has been replaced by a hint of a Texan drawl. Gil is blond, waspy, and eccentrically handsome. No schlemiel this intelligent and worldly young man who has his life already measured out in coffee spoons--silver coffee spoons, probably owned by his future father-in-law's company.

Like the conventional Woody persona, he's a writer. And like the real Woody Allen, he wants to write a novel, and all his Hollywood screenplays pale in comparison to this one overriding ambition. But the novel eludes him.

Dissatisfied with the present and vaguely aware that his materialistic, Republican fiancee may not be the right woman for him, he welcomes the opportunity to become a time traveler. Time travel movies always have severe logic problems, but it is easier to resolve the logic if you only go back in time for the odd evening here and there.

Gil goes back to the 1920's, the era he longs for. The real Woody Allen longs for the 1940's, his childhood years. The rather basic theme is that we always long for some Golden Age in the past, and if we go back to that age, we'll find those people longing for something previous to their era.

The present is too mundane for those who are actually experiencing it. They yearn for a lost paradise, a perfection that they sense must have existed somewhere else and has somehow eluded them; therefore, it must have been in the past.

It's a pleasant film although the forays into the past are not the most authentic period pieces. A mustache for Adrien Brody does not fool the viewer into believing he is really Salvador Dali. It looks a bit like a costume party.

The ending is vague and doesn't resolve anything; it only encourages us to dream, nay, to hallucinate about the past.