Running Time: 1 hr, 34 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: Woody Allen
Quick Impressions:
Now that I’ve seen this, I understand what people mean when they say it’s a “return to form” for Woody Allen. I knew almost nothing about Midnight in Paris going in—just that it had a lot of glowing reviews (which I had not actually read), it was a film by Woody Allen, and it was set in Paris. Just before we left, while I was still hoping we’d be able to leave our house soon enough to make the movie on time, I watched a preview online which told me one more key thing about the movie—I definitely wanted to see it.
The Good and The Great:
The movie opens with a number of scenes of different parts of Paris at slightly different times of day set to pleasant music with a vaguely nostalgic quality. This opening lasts long enough that your mind begins to drift. I personally started thinking about the best day I ever spent in Rome, the one day that did nothing in particular.
Then after a long time, you meet engaged couple Gil and Inez, played by Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams. My first thought after the opening was, “If this is going to be a contest between his fiancée and Paris, then I feel so sad for this couple because she’ll never win. She can’t beat Paris.” After watching for a few more minutes, I thought, “She can’t even beat Malibu.” By the time I realized that she’d also lost to Pfluegerville and just about any vaguely habitable corner of Siberia, I started to understand that this wasn’t a love story about Gil and Inez.
It was a love story about Paris. There’s no woman in the world who can match Paris for beauty, charm, and enchantment, I thought. And then I saw Marion Cotillard.
The movie was just beautiful (and so was Marion Cotillard), truly inspiring to writers. Gil is, in his own words, a hack screenwriter. More than anything, he wants to finish his novel and write more meaningful works. And maybe he’d like to live in Paris. Inez is the daughter of a conservative businessman (played with winning panache by Kurt Fuller), who wants to get married and buy a big, expensively furnished house in Malibu. Her mother, Helen (played by Mimi Kennedy) is a loud and opinionated woman with an extraordinary gift—she can spend an entire day out and about in Paris and only see price tags.
Watching the early portions of the movie, you think in frustration, Why would any artist want to be with someone who diminishes or fails to appreciate his art? When you see lovely fountains at Versailles and feel inspired to drown three of the characters on screen including the protagonist’s fiancée, you know that you’re peeking in on a relationship that is never going to work out.
Gil and Inez spend the early parts of the movie trapped on outings with the most annoying pseudo-intellectual pedant alive. Paul is the type of guy grad students pretend to be when making fun of themselves at parties. He’s just intolerable. His one redeeming quality is that he’s played by Michael Sheen, and it’s so refreshing to see Sheen playing anyone other than Tony Blair. (I’ve actually seen him capably play a number of very different roles but never anybody quite like Paul.)
Most of the movie focuses on adventures Gil has as he walks around Paris at night, learning to live again with help from various Parisians that he happens to meet. Away from his incompatible fiancée, her aggravating family, and her intolerable friends, Gil is left alone with his thoughts and with Paris, more alive with color and history at night than anyone not walking in Gil’s shoes would expect or understand.
In one scene, Gil tries to take Inez with him, to make her understand what he finds so amazing about Paris after dark. Of course, she leaves before he’s able to make her understand. But that hardly matters. She can’t even see the wonder of the city in the daylight, envision the potential of Gil’s novel, or appreciate the magic of walking the streets of Paris in the rain.
Best Joke:
I love Gil’s brief meditation on Indian food. Beyond that, I personally thought the funniest character in the movie was the eccentric artist, played by Adrien Brody, with whom Gil briefly shares a booth and a conversation.
Gil is working on a novel about a man who works in a curiosity shop and is enthralled by Paris as it was in the 1920s, so many of the funniest jokes require that you have at least some knowledge of the period that so fascinates Gil. Watching the movie without knowing something about the cultural milieu of 1920s Paris is like saying, “Hmm. What poem should I choose to read as my first work of literature ever? How about something by T.S. Eliot!” You’ll still laugh if you don’t get the in-jokes because the actors are talented and their comic timing can’t be beat, but it’s funnier if you’re in on the joke.
Funniest Scene:
There’s a joke in the preview about the private detective Inez’s dad sends after Gil that convinced me I wanted to see the movie right away. It’s even funnier in context, and when the joke came to full fruition almost everyone in the audience laughed out loud.
Best Scene:
I like the perfect evening shared (to some degree) by Gil and Marion Cotillard’s Adriana. Each makes a realization essential to his or her own happiness. The entire scene is beautiful and captivating, and it’s also an essential moment in Gil’s search for what makes life meaningful.
Best Surprise:
Much of the movie as it unfolds is a delightful surprise, and I think viewers will enjoy it the most if they go in blind as I did, knowing almost nothing about what Gil Pender finds so fascinating about Paris after dark.
The Performances:
A long time ago, I used to like Owen Wilson a lot, and now I remember why. When I first heard his voice speaking over the darkened screen, I’ll confess that I thought, What is Lightning McQueen doing in this movie? But when we actually get to see him, he gives a very strong performance as unhappy screenwriter and burgeoning novelist, Gil Pender. It’s kind of weird to watch Wilson playing a character who seems suspiciously like Woody Allen. At times, it seems like Allen has been replaced during your performance by his understudy, Owen Wilson. But that’s not Wilson’s fault. He gives a really solid performance and manages to win the audience’s sympathy very quickly and keep it throughout the film.
Rachel McAdams is also very good as his beyond incompatible fiancée, Inez. The character is pretty unsympathetic, though one could be charitable and say that Gil brings out the worst in her. I loved Kurt Fuller as her awful father, John. And Carla Bruni is in the movie! She’s the First Lady of France. That’s cool.
The most colorful performances in the film come from the eccentric characters Gil bumps into while exploring Paris on the moonlit strolls he takes for inspiration. We see winning performances from skilled actors like Kathy Bates as a fellow American in Paris who critiques Gil’s manuscript, Tom Hiddleston as another novelist torn by a difficult relationship, and Adrien Brody, who just cracks me up every second he’s onscreen. Alison Pill and Corey Stoll also give likeable performances and make quite an impression. And Gad Elmaleh (the star of just about every single French comedy that manages to reach screens in Texas) is just a scream as the detective following Gil, though he doesn’t really have to do much. The situation does a lot of the work for him.
Marion Cotillard gives a nuanced and captivating performance as Adriana, the woman who fascinates Gil and lights up the screen each time she appears. And Léa Seydoux is lovely and compelling as Gabrielle, the girl intrigued by Gil’s appreciation for Cole Porter. Seydoux’s Gabrielle is so refreshing simply because she’s not unimaginably horrible like everyone else in Gil encounters by day, poor man.
The Negatives:
My big complaint about the movie is that the fiancée and her family and friends are so horrible that they’re more like caricatures than fully rounded characters. If the movie were a novel, I’d suspect that the seemingly third person narration was really free and indirect discourse by Gil. In other words, surely we’re seeing them through his eyes, not as they are. Could they possibly be that horrible?
Of course, I suppose they could be. But then why did Gil ever get mixed up with them in the first place? In my experience, most people who seem that horrible on the surface do have some redeeming qualities (beyond a vague liking for some kinds of Indian food) as you look closer and get to know them better. It’s entirely too easy to hate these people. The ones we meet after midnight are all charming, interesting, and largely sympathetic despite their sometimes glaring character flaws.
Woody Allen obviously really hates Inez and her family and friends, and the audience has no choice but to hate them, too. They’re just awful.
Overall:
I really enjoyed Midnight in Paris and so did my husband. It’s a charming, whimsical, and sometimes moving film that celebrates art and life. If you take someone to see it, and your date leaves the theater wanting to go to Paris, don’t be surprised. (But a cheaper solution might be a trip to a second-hand book store.) This is a movie about the magic that happens when you’re in the right place at the right time with the right person. It also makes you want to write. It’s a lovely film.