Midnight In Paris

Movie
2012


Midnight in Paris combines two of the people I like the least in all of Hollywood. One being Woody Allen and the other being Owen Wilson. Despite this demented duo I found that I really enjoyed this movie - and I wasn't expecting to.

Wilson is an actor I find annoying in general. I thought he was really good in that off beat movie The Royal Tannebaums and not too bad in the Wedding Crashers, but in everything else he plays the same irritating, punch me in the face character. Sure there's a little bit of "that" Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris, but the writing is so good and the dialogue so snappy that you forget that you don't like the main protagonist at all.

I have always been a fan of Rachel McAdams and was looking forward to her contribution here, but honestly anyone could have played her part because this was Wilson's movie from the start.

Gil (Wilson) is a successful Hollywood writer who had grown bored and now has set off to write his first novel. Unfortunately it was not going well. Inez, his fiance, (McAdams) takes him to Paris piggybacking on her father's business trip. Gil falls in love with Paris and thinks they should live there after they get married. Inez scoffs at his romantic notions of the city, brushing his suggestions aside as just crazy talk.

Ultimately Inez bores him with her pretentious friends and culturally bitter parents, causing Gil to seek inspiration by drunkenly wandering that streets of Paris at night. And that's where the fun begins...

At the strike of midnight he is invited into a party car that transports him back to the 1920s where he meets the people that he most admired. To his utter bemusement and delight he meets F.Scott Fitzgerald, his wife Zelda, Hemingway, Picasso, Cole Porter, Gertrude Stein and the delightful Salvador Dali (and his obsession with rhinoceros').  Night after night at the strike of midnight he enters the Golden Age of literature and art to find a special something (and someone) that leads to a breakthrough in his own work.

Adriana, played by the Oscar winning Marion Cotillard, once Picasso's girlfriend soon becomes Gil's muse and the object of his desire. She is also pining for a Golden Era of her own - convinced the1890's Europe was the pinnacle of all culture.

Woody Allen put together an interesting and snappy screenplay that was simultaneously clever and funny. After watching the film I'm not surprised he won the Oscar this year. I was sure Allen had lost his edge decades ago. He put together a fine cast including Kathy Bates, Allison Pill, Adrien Brody, Michael Sheen and Corey Stall as Hemingway. Although I still don't like Allen or Wilson I am big enough to give them both a hat tip for this gem.


4 of 5 stars


CW

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