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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 fiancée (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. --Robert Horton
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Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Luminous and charming,
By
This review is from: Midnight in Paris Bilingual (DVD)
A charming, sweet film, that explores the nature of nostalgia (its glowand its darker shadows), and shows off Paris, both modern day, and in the 1920s, almost as beautifully as Manhattan showed off New York. Laced with wonderful cameo and supporting performances (Adrien Brody, Kathy Bates, Marion Cotillard, Corey Stoll, just to name a few) and gifted by a quirky, lovably sad Owen Wilson as a sort of Eyeore of a struggling writer in the lead. Wilson is probably the best stand in yet for Allen in one of his films, precisely because he's so different from Allen, and doesn't seem to be doing an Allen impersonation. (Even Allen admitted that part of the appeal in casting Wilson was casting someone so far from himself). The 94 minutes of the film flew by, and never lost it's charm. A number of professional critics noted that this was a new tone for Allen, neither laugh out loud comedy, nor serious drama (or, as in his greatest films a combination of the two), but is more of a light drama, with a gentle comic whimsy. I actually think Allen started exploring this interesting new tone with his last film 'You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger' And it does seem to have reinvigorated him. I did have a couple of problems with the film. First, Rachel McAdams as Wilson's fiancé, along with her family, were made too caraciturish, too obviously 'bad' for a film this subtle. McAdams is a brilliant actress, but here she seems pushed into being a symbol of all that's wrong with shallow, materialistic Americans. More problematically, after gently, subtly exploring it's themes for the whole film, Allen suddenly starts laying them on very thick at the end, putting them very literally into the dialogue, almost as if he doesn't trust us to be smart enough to get the point of the whole lovely film he just showed us. But these are minor complaints, and while this may not be one of Allen's great films, it is a very good one, and that makes it special and worth seeking out.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful Film: Allen's Gift Still Sparkling,
By
This review is from: Midnight in Paris Bilingual (DVD)
Fantastic movie for art-lovers, well-acted, casted, and an excellent story.I couldn't see anyone apart from Owen Wilson in this role. It's good to finally see him in a good film again.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very Woody Allen,
This review is from: Midnight in Paris Bilingual [Blu-ray] (Blu-ray)
If you love Woody Allen, this is a film you must have. Funny, quirky and intelligent, Midnight in Paris is ssheer pleasure to watch. I recommend it.
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