“Midnight in Paris,” like so many Woody Allen pictures, opens with a series of shots that give a sense of the place you’ll spend the next hour and a half. Here the beginning almost perfectly parallels the opening to “Manhattan,” the writer-director’s love letter to the city in which he was born and raised. We see all manner of Parisians milling about. It’s a bit overlong, in fact, as A Day in the Life of Paris threatens to feel like a whole day. But soon the scene is set, and Allen finally does what he does best — offer a window into a group of clever, neurotic people struggling for a reprieve from their inevitable deaths. Owen Wilson stars as Gil, a Hollywood screenwriter visiting the city with his fiancee, Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her privileged parents. Gil makes a pretty penny churning out scripts, but he craves a deeper life. Like so many Americans, he thinks Paris is the place to find it. “I feel like the Parisians kind of get me,” he says, in one of the film’s many subtly funny lines.
He’s so enraptured with thoughts of expat Paris that he manages to transport himself there. Late one night, in the dark romanticism of the City of Light, a taxi stops and someone motions Gil to get inside. There he finds Scott (Tom Hiddleston) and Zelda (Allison Pill) Fitzgerald, who are soon introducing him to Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), and Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody). As well as Adriana (Marion Cotillard) a muse to men like Pablo Picasso, who takes a shine to the new addition to the crowd. Gil’s love of the past threatens his present, though, as Inez spends more time with the pseudo-intellectual Paul (Michael Sheen), whose specialty is insisting he knows more about Paris’ history than its experts, such as the museum curator played by French first lady Carla Bruni.
| On screen |
| ‘Midnight in Paris’ |
| 4 out of 5 stars |
| Stars: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Michael Sheen |
| Director: Woody Allen |
| Rated: PG-13 for some sexual references and smoking |
| Running time: 100 minutes |
“Midnight in Paris” has many similarities to Allen’s past work — the delightfully pretentious Paul is rather like the Alan Alda character in “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The whole film feels a little like the Marshall McLuhan moment in “Annie Hall.” But there’s something fresh about this film anyway: Who would have thought Woody Allen would make a science-fiction film?
Indeed, this film is his best in years. It’s funny, warm, even enchanting. Allen might not know Paris like he knows New York. That’s why it’s so wise of him to have made a film not about present-day Paris, but about its past, a mythic past that witty Americans — not unlike Allen and his actors, who often seem to do their best work in his films — helped create.
