by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film Charles and I watched last night was Midnight in
Paris, Woody Allen’s 2011 release that was
the biggest box-office draw of his career — an unexpected commercial comeback
for someone who had pretty much been written off as a guy who was going to be
making little art-house movies for the rest of his life — and though almost no
one writing about this film has mentioned it, it’s actually based on a routine
he did on one of his stand-up albums in the 1960’s, in which he did an
elaborate fantasy about himself hanging out with the “Lost Generation” of
American expats in Paris in the 1920’s and kept getting punched out, mostly by
Ernest Hemingway but at least once (in the punch line of the whole routine) by
Gertrude Stein. As part of this routine, Allen also deadpanned, “Scott and
Zelda Fitzgerald were just breaking up their New Year’s party — it was April.” Midnight
in Paris deals with Gil Pender (Owen
Wilson), a successful screenwriter who’s decided his career is no longer
artistically fulfilling, so he’s dropped out of screen work to write a novel
and he’s gone to Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel MacAdams) and her parents
John (Kurt Fuller) and Helen (Mimi Kennedy). While in Paris Gil and Inez run
into another couple, a pedantic professor named Paul (Michael Sheen) and his
wife Carol (Nina Arianda).
One night, when Paul and Carol are going to a dance
club and want Gil and Inez to come along, Gil begs off and instead goes for a
long romantic solo walk through the streets of Paris until he hits a particular
corner as the clock strikes midnight (literally — there’s a bell clock audible
on the soundtrack) and an old car pulls up that turns out to contain the literati and glitterati of the Lost Generation: F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston), his wife
Zelda (Alison Pill) and Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), younger and
considerably less grizzled than the late-in-life photos we’re used to seeing
and also without his famous beard. I suppose Midnight in Paris could be described by that wretched cliché “magical
realism,” since we’re not given any scientific explanation for the time-travel
element of the plot (which itself derives from a previous Allen short story,
“The Kugelmass Episode,” in which a middle-aged Jewish professor is transported
via a mysterious cabinet into the plot of his favorite novel, Madame
Bovary, and he not only has an affair with
her in her own fictional world but brings her back into our own and complains,
among other things, that his restaurant bills for their dates are approaching
the size of the U.S. defense budget; the story’s best line comes when Allen
describes how other professors are perplexed when their editions of Madame
Bovary include her affair with a
middle-aged American Jew, but they rationalize it by saying things like, “Oh,
well, every time you read a classic, you discover something new”).
Instead the
plot is a kind of spoof of nostalgia and nostalgia freaks (the protagonist of
Gil’s novel is a clerk at a “nostalgia shop,” which Inez derisively refers to
as “one of those places where they sell Shirley Temple dolls”) overlaid on a
typically Allenesque tale of a mismatched couple realizing, through a series of
tragicomic events, how mismatched they are and parting. Gil’s fantastical
adventures in his dream Paris of the 1920’s lead him to quite a few other
famous names of the period, including Gertrude Stein (a marvelous turn by Kathy
Bates), T. S. Eliot (David Lowe), Salvador Dali (a nicely theatrical bit by
Adrien Brody), Man Ray (John Cordier), Luis Buñuel (Adrien de Van), Djuna Barnes
(Emmanuelle Uzan), Cole Porter (Yves Heck — though the voice we hear on the
soundtrack that’s supposedly Porter performing his own songs doesn’t sound like
the real Porter’s records and I suspect Allen used recordings by Bobby Short),
Josephine Baker (Sonia Rolland), Pablo Picasso (Marcial de Fonzo Bo) and his
(fictional) mistress Adriana (Marion Cotillard, in what’s far and away her best
film since La Vie en Rose). Gil
and Adriana have a fling of sorts — there’s a nice comic moment in which Inez
is being questioned by her parents as to whether Gil is having an affair, and
since he’s begged off all those disco dates she says, “Well, one thing’s for
sure, she doesn’t dance” — and then Allen cuts to Gil and Adriana dancing to a
1920’s band version of “Ain’t She Sweet?” (Many of Allen’s films use the
characters’ different tastes in music to symbolize and show us the differences
in their personalities.)
The film is both an exercise in nostalgia and a
marvelous send-up of it; towards the end Adriana reveals that she’s really
bored with her own existence in
the 1920’s and the era she really
wanted to live in was the Belle Epoque (the 1890’s) — and she and Gil end up there, only to find that the
big-shot artists of the time, Toulouse-Lautrec (Vincent Menjou Cortes), Gauguin
(Olivier Rabourdin) and Degas (François Rostain), really wish that they were back in the Renaissance hobnobbing with
Michelangelo and Titian! What’s more, the private detective Inez’s father Jack
hired to follow Gil to see if he was having an affair disappears down his own
historic rathole and finds himself forced to flee for his life from the agents
of the Reign of Terror. It also turns out Inez is the one having an affair —
with Paul, whom we’ve been told was an old friend of hers from college and
actually dated her before he married someone else — and in a plot twist we can
see coming about four reels away, Gil ends up not only deciding to live in
Paris but getting an alternate (present-day) partner, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux). Midnight
in Paris at once celebrates the appeal of
nostalgia and spoofs it — a double act Allen has been playing at least since Manhattan, in which he contrasted George Gershwin’s music from
the 1920’s and the 1930’s with the New York of the time (1979) by using
Gershwin’s songs to score a contemporary film (and the reviewer for the music
magazine Fanfare got into the
spirit by reviewing the soundtrack album as if Gershwin were a modern-day young
composer of unformed but unquestionably impressive talent) — and one of the most
delightful scenes shows Gil shopping at the Paris flea market for an old 78 of
a Porter song and ending up with Adriana’s diary, which he can’t read
(Gabrielle translates it for him) but which gives him the clue how to woo
Adriana in her time.
Midnight in Paris is a real gem, beautifully acted — especially by Owen Wilson, who
manages to capture Woody Allen’s own mannerisms and vocal tics, though they
“read” quite differently from the WASP’y Wilson than they did when Allen was
delivering them in his nightclub days with his ineradicably Jewish intonations
and affect — and sensitively directed, though the cinematography by Johanne
Debas and Darius Khondji is locked way too tightly in today’s past-is-brown, present-is-brown, everything-is-brown clichés. Personally, I thought Allen’s
comeback should have happened two films earlier, with Whatever Works — a movie that was a homecoming for him both
geographically (it was both shot and set in New York City; he’d finally got a production deal that didn’t oblige him to work
in Europe, as most of his recent contracts have) and thematically (a Jewish
male lead and a plot about intergenerational relationships and unexpected
personal transformations) — but it was nice to see Midnight in Paris achieve the success Woody Allen deserves and become
an early favorite for Academy Awards contention — even though this film, shot
in France with American actors and set in Paris, was ultimately supplanted in
the Oscar race by The Artist, a
film shot and set in Hollywood by people from France!
