My, did I ever smile while watching Midnight in Paris. I started almost immediately. The movie opens with a series of shots showing Paris on a dry morning that passes into a rainy night. The sequence is unabashedly romantic and completely effective. I smiled when we meet Gil, played by Owen Wilson, who’s visiting Paris with his mismatched fiancé Inez. He’s an unsatisfied screenwriter who dreams of living and working in the City of Lights as it was in the 1920s, a time when writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald walked the streets in the gathering dusk and labored to create things of great beauty. She wants to shop. And I really started to smile when Gil, alone and a little drunk on some Parisian street corner, is beckoned into a passing car and borne back into that Paris from the past. I didn’t really stop smiling until I was well out of the theater.
The conceit behind the movie is immensely appealing, and it is made all the more so by Allen’s decision not to try and explain it. At midnight in Paris, Gil passes into the past where he rubs elbows with famous figures from the age. Gil accepts it, we see it, and nothing more need be said. The mechanic provides Allen with many opportunities to surprise and delight the audience. It’s a kick to see his take on Ernest Hemingway, who speaks in strong staccato statements which seem taken straight from his books, or Salvador Dali, who approaches even ordinary topics with the bizarre flourish befitting a surrealist. There’s always a new nugget to be unearthed, and those possessing even a passing familiarity with the period will be very charmed.
Key to the movie’s success is Owen Wilson’s low-key portrayal of Gil, this film’s stand-in for Woody Allan. As an actor, Allen has a fidgety, nervous presence. No matter what’s happening on screen, we get the sense that he’s not really enjoying it. Wilson is different. He’s laconic, relaxed, and earnest. When Gil meets his literary heroes he’s stunned into delighted silence, and we buy it. His humility is one of the things which make him attractive to Adriana, a simpering French siren played with the perfect touch of understated vulnerability by Marion Cotillard. It’s easy to see why Gil prefers Adriana, who lives in the 20s, to his materialistic fiancé, played by Rachel McAdams, although the script doesn’t really give the latter a chance to show off any redeeming qualities.
Ultimately that doesn’t much matter, since Midnight in Paris is principally about setting a mood and a tone. At this Allen has become an expert. Paris as observed here becomes very nearly as bewitching to the audience as it does to Gil. The colors are rich and everywhere there is soft light. Dreamy music unfolds slowly from the background. At one point a character comments that Paris looks most beautiful in the rain. As she and Gil walk across a bridge while lights twinkle in the distance and rain patters on the cobble-stones, we’re hard-pressed to disagree. This may be a post-card Paris, but as seen through Allen’s camera, with its lingering long takes and highlighting of landmarks in the night, it all seems impossibly romantic.
Which, incidentally, is the point. Allen eventually makes an observation about the folly of this kind of unattainable romanticism, but the appeal of the movie, I think, lies mainly in its willingness to embrace it. This Paris is the kind of sparkling, shining place one visits in their unbidden daydreams. It’s exciting and sexy and soft in a way that exists only in the movies, and for that I think it deserves respect, and a sigh.
