Midnight in Paris
Directed by:
Woody AllenScreenplay:
Woody AllenCinematography:
Darius KhondjiCast:
Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Kurt Fuller, Mimi Kennedy, Michael Sheen, Alison Pill, Adrien Brody, Sonia Rolland, Léa Seydoux, Kathy Bates (more)VOD (2)
Plots(1)
Paris is a city that lends itself to daydreaming, to walking the streets and imagining all sorts of magic, a quality that Woody Allen understands perfectly. Midnight in Paris is Allen's charming reverie about just that quality, with a screenwriter hero named Gil (Owen Wilson) who strolls the lanes of Paris with his head in the clouds and walks right into his own best fantasy. Gil is there with his materialistic fiance (Rachel McAdams) and her unpleasant parents, taking a break from his financially rewarding but spiritually unfulfilling Hollywood career - and he can't stop thinking that all he wants to do is quit the movies, move to Paris, and write that novel he's been meaning to finish. You know, be like his heroes in the bohemian Paris of the 1920s. Sure enough, a midnight encounter draws him into the jazzy world of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Picasso and Dali, and an intense Ernest Hemingway, who promises to bring Gil's manuscript to Gertrude Stein for review. Gil wakes up every morning back in the real world, but returning to his enchanted Paris proves fairly easy.
In the execution of this marvelous fantasia, Allen pursues the idea that people of every generation have always romanticized a previous age as golden (this is in fact explained to us by Michael Sheen's pedantic art expert), but he also honors Gil's need to find out certain truths for himself. The movie's on the side of gentle fantasy, and it has some literary/cinematic in-jokes that call back to the kind of goofy humor Allen created in Love and Death. The film is guilty of the slackness that Allen's latter-day directing has sometimes shown, and the underwritten roles for McAdams and Marion Cotillard are better acted than written. But the city glows with Allen's romantic sense of it, and Owen Wilson has just the right nice-guy melancholy to put the idea over. A worthy entry in the Cinema of the Daydream.
(Entertainment One)
Videos (9)
Reviews (11)
I would say no, I'm pretty sure this is my first Woody Allen movie. As a result I didn't know what to expect, but dug what I got and came out with a pretty satisfied and full tummy. Paris, the city I loved, the Lost Generation, and the message that drives the film – it all made for a tasty whole. Plus, Owen wasn't bad, although in some of the crappy parts I'd just rather see someone more... I don't know if "erudite" is the right word. A film full of art and thoughts of the past. Apparently there's nothing like living in the present.
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Like all Woody Allen films, Midnight in Paris has its own unmistakable charm. I became convinced of this with the initial montage of shots of Paris. Owen Wilson, whom I didn't find too convincing at first, pleasantly surprised me. The interweaving of today with the 1920s is fantastic and I think both eras were captured perfectly. I feel like I've returned from a lovely walk through Paris, which I hadn't experienced in this light before. Nice, 4 stars.
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I've noticed that Woody Allen's films tend to be more enjoyable for me when their neurotic author doesn't make an appearance. In this case, Owen Wilson's portrayal of Gil evoked too much of Allen's essence for my liking. The romantic entanglements and the trajectory of relationships in the storyline weren't particularly challenging to decipher. The only thing left was time travel, which didn't do it for me this time around. Personally, I've never felt the desire to visit Paris; perhaps because it's surrounded by France and predominantly inhabited by the French, a combination that doesn't quite resonate with me. And I didn't even know that I could experience guillotining or a plague epidemic there if I chose the right kind of transport at midnight. / Lesson learned: Reminiscing can be nice, but there's a limit.
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A very nice film. It's not perfect, and it can't match the atmosphere of The Purple Rose of Cairo, but I watched it for an hour and a half with a permanent smile, and that's to be appreciated. Woody Allen's screenplay seems to combine the magic of two of his short stories - “A Twenties Memory", in which he recounts his experiences with Hemingway, Stein, Picasso, Toklas and others, and the excellent “The Kugelmass Episode", whose protagonist starts cheating on his wife with Madame Bovary thanks to an illusionist. Midnight in Paris is an enjoyable watch that could have been more elaborate (especially when it comes to the book Gil buys and reads about himself in), but its idea about the desire to live in other times at the expense of the present and especially its ending are so beautiful that almost all the criticisms had to be put aside.
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A commercial for Paris. The Paris of dreamers and incorrigible romantics; so the absolute opposite of the real Paris. But so what? Woody manages to intoxicate us with the almost melancholic atmosphere of the “city of love" so much that it gets you wanting to go there... And add to this the outstanding Owen Wilson (who gives a better performance of Woody than Woody himself), the again cute (and again in a completely different way) Marion Cotillard, all the scenes with the big names of surrealism “rhino-Buñuel-Dalí-Man Ray-rhino", the playfulness (that’s right, Allen steals from himself; and so what?) and the overall relaxed atmosphere showing that “we all had a great time" which comes across wonderfully to the viewer. Which doesn’t always necessarily happen.
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