God bless Woody Allen.
No other filmmaker on the planet could have conceived a project like this. Even fewer could have made it quite as charming. The story is as simple as they come. The improbably named Gil and Inez (Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams looking ethereal and somehow not reminiscent of Wedding Crashers) are an engaged American couple vacationing in Paris. He's a self-described Hollywood hack and she's... well, she's terrible. So rarely do we see a screen character so entirely devoid of redeeming qualities, and McAdams makes her a blast to loathe. Wilson, on the other hand, slips effortlessly into the Woody Role. Who knew?
While his fiance dallies with her pedantic crush of yesteryear, Gil wanders the streets in drunken elation. He yearns for the Paris of the 1920's, and suddenly, magically, there he is. The film reveals its delightful game at a party where Gil slowly realizes he's talking to F. Scott Fitzgerald and his lively wife Zelda. Most movies would feature Gil freaking out, making a fool of himself via various anachronisms or attempting to analyze his present predicament, but Midnight in Paris is a dream, and in dreams we take our decidedly odd surroundings for granted. Over the course of several enchanted evenings, Gil rubs elbows with a slew of the early twentieth century's greatest artists. To list them all here would ruin the fun, but I will say that Corey Stoll absolutely brings down the house as an impossibly sincere Ernest Hemingway.
Midnight in Paris has a lot to say about nostalgia and writers and nostalgic writers, but its message isn't as sobering as one might expect. Every generation inevitably thinks it's the worst, this we know to be true and this we know to be wrong, but that is no reason not to dream. Especially if an artist's job is to, as Kathy Bates' erudite Gertrude Stein declares, "find an antidote." Allen's new film is certainly an antidote to 90% of the joyless romps with which it shares cinema space. It is elegant, bewitching and lovely, and you should see it with someone you quite like.
SumOlogy: Escapism at its finest.
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