Sometimes I wish I lived through the 1970s, in New York or Chicago, or even Detroit. I wish I could be there in the golden age of Funk and Soul music. A time when it took real musicianship and a real sense of substance to really make it big. But this kind of naivete really never takes me anywhere but back to my own sense of romanticism for that period in music. Such is the paradox in the great Woody Allen's latest film "Midnight In Paris", a charming and satisfying comedy with beautiful photography, a crisply written, tightly plotted script, boasting the finest Owen Wilson performance in a really long time and a thematic eloquence to boot.
Wilson plays Gil Pender, a successful Hollywood screenwriter of many funny, but forgettable films, vacationing in Paris with his fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams, who is absolutely stunning here, but in one-note role) and her vapid right-wing parents. Gil is absolutely smitten with Paris, and is immediately taken with the idea of throwing his cushy Beverly Hills life away in exchange for spending the rest of his days walking in the rain through Paris and writing novels. After a wine-drenched evening with Inez's pretentious, overly flirty friend Paul (Michael Sheen, donning a shockingly good American accent) and his wife, Gil finds himself inexplicably transported back in time to 1920s Paris, where he meets F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, among others that I won't reveal as to spoil the fun.
Devotees of Woody like to separate his films into a number of classes, including minor Woody, funny Woody and classic Woody. What's interesting about this film is that it is a mix of all three. He keeps a nice, steady pace to the proceedings here, lingering enough on character, theme and dashes of his trademark humor to keep things light and fairly engaging. I liked that the plot device of time travel exists not as a gimmicky bludgeon, but more as an extension of Gil's internal struggles as a hopeless romantic torn between the prospects of the seduction and nostalgia of the past and the constant uncertainty of the present. Each character is allowed a moment of memorable poignancy too, as seen in a surprisingly intense monologue about life, death and sex by Woody's version of Ernest Hemingway (played by Television vet Corey Stoll, who absolutely sinks his teeth in here.
Woody's better films of the past two decades (Match Point, Vicky Cristina Barcelona) are at their best when his leads are accompanied by strongly written, directed and acted supporting characters (see Penelope Cruz's Oscar for VCB as proof in the pudding). Here, we have the always ravishing Marion Cotillard as Adriana, Wilson's love interest who, like his character, longs for the beauty of an earlier era. Cotillard, always sumptuous, is radiant here. And like many of Woody's great female roles, Adriana's beauty and scars of the past are the direct cause of her tragic endgame (don't worry, it's not so bad).
In the end though, the film draws to a relatively light, but satisfying conclusion; it's a lesson of embracing the uncertainties rather than living inside a disguise of predictability. The subject matter here is certainly not as dark or cynical or relentlessly depressing as heavy Woody, but leaves a rather positive, uplifting aftertaste. It's nice to know that a filmmaker who has been around as long as Woody (he's 75) can still make films this poignant. "Midnight In Paris" is a short, memorable, romantic lark that has given me the opportunity to coin a new term: Just-plain Woody.
