Just as a French president in
waiting suffers a career ending pratfall in some insanely pricey Manhattan
digs, the one man capable of preserving our dearest fantasies about Gotham and Paris
returns with a minor masterpiece about why the Kindle Generation clings to a
Gertrude Stein led Lost Generation. In Woody Allen’s best movie since Match
Point, Midnight in Paris, a frustrated American
screenwriter Gil (the fearsomely talented Owen Wilson) yearns to escape a
horrible pending marriage to the philistine daughter of a right wing Tea Party
spouting tycoon. Gil’s only hope of avoiding his appointed fate as a hack for
hire arrives mysteriously as he stumbles into a time warp hangout for a generation
of artists who have come to symbolize the Twentieth Century’s idea of following
your muse: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dali, Picasso and their no nonsense den mom
Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates in her best screen moments since she terrified Jack
Nicholson in the hot tube in About Schmidt.
“People who live in the past,
people who think they’d be happier in another time live in a permanent state of
denial.”
I’m sitting in a folding chair in San
Francisco’s professional screening room The Variety Club, the chair a last
minute effort by the publicist for Midnight in Paris to accommodate a
crush of critics awaiting Woody forty-two. I start chatting with a much younger
critic and to my great delight discover that he too is happy to be sitting so
close to the screen. The young man and I swap favorite Woody moments from his
golden age – Love and Death (still the best spoof of War and Peace)
to Deconstructing Harry where he regained his stride after the near
career finishing breakup with Mia Farrow.
Among queer folks of a certain age
many life passages have a Woody attached to them: Zelig (the thinking
person’s Forest Gump) will always reek of joints circulating around the Endup;
Annie Hall recalls my time in a bisexual ménage; and The Purple Rose
of Cairo features Mia Farrow as a Depression-era moviegoer whose
brute of a husband tries to beat up her cinema fantasy lover.
If Purple Rose unmasks the
dark underside behind our movie addictions, Midnight in Paris examines
the vital and unacknowledged role played by nostalgia in the lives of culture
vultures and pseudo intellectuals. Who needs Chekhov or Tolstoy when a Woody
parody seems to hit all the philosophical beats.
Back in his early salad days as a
standup comedian playing to sold out college age crowds at hip Sixties watering
holes Woody Allen started riffing on cultural landmines like Oral
Contraception, The Damaged Pet Store or The Bullet in My Breast Pocket. Routines
as classic and defining as Mike Nichols and Elaine May’s great Freudian verbal
jousts would later, seamlessly become notes for Allen screen comedies. Allen
who still contributes to The New Yorker and the stage has turned
artistic recycling into a fine art.
In some ways Gil’s midnight taxi to the Twenties is a gimmick
as fantastic as Jeff Daniels stepping down from the screen in Purple Rose; the
conceit works in part because it goes unexplained. Allen, too, has become a
genius at spotting actors who can mime his essence.
In Midnight in Paris Allen
asks the Dallas raised Owen Wilson to play a lost soul, “I’m a Hollywood hack
writer who’s never tried real writing until now.”
The premise of an American naïf who
imagines himself commingling with his intellectual betters in Gertrude Stein’s Twenties
Paris literary salon first pops up in Allen’s standup patter about The Lost
Generation.
“I was in Europe many years ago
with Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had just written his first novel, Gertrude
Stein and I read it and we said it was a good novel but not a great one that it
needed some work but it could be a fine book. And we laughed over it and
Hemingway punched me in the mouth.
“That Winter we went to Spain to
see (a young matador) fight – he looked to be eighteen but Gertrude Stein said
he was nineteen but he only looked eighteen and I said sometimes a boy of
eighteen will look nineteen whereas other times a nineteen-year-old will easily
look eighteen, that’s the way it is with a true Spaniard. We laughed over this
and Gertrude Stein punched me in the mouth.”
Depressed by the vapid materialism
of his bride to be, Inez (Rachel McAdams) Gil takes a midnight stroll through
Paris’ Rue Montagne St. Genevieve where he is lured into a Jazz Age limo by a
bubbly couple, F. Scott and Zelda – Tom Hiddleston channels the legendary
romantic novelist and Milk’s Alison Pil totally reinvents herself as the
zany self-destructive Zelda. In one of his best gags Allen has Gil offer Zelda
a Valium, “The pill of the future,” to keep her from leaping into the River
Seine.
Allen relies on our slightly musty
memories from freshman English or grad school to fill in the blanks as a superb
supporting cast takes turns doing the Stein Salon crowd: Adrien Brody (Salvador
Dali), Marcial Di Fonzo Bo (Picasso) and most winningly Corey Stoll finds a
fresh take on lampooning Hemingway’s macho real guy persona.
Gil’s attempt to concoct a new life
plan that is not entirely delusional is bolstered by his romantic fling with a
young woman, Adriana -- Marion Cotillard demonstrates anew why her Oscar turn
as Edith Piaf was no fluke -- who feels as out of sync with her Twenties period
as Gil does in his pricey, snobby Twenty-first Century Paris. Michael Sheen
(Prime Minister Tony Blair in The Queen) breaths fresh life into that
Allen standby, the pseudo intellectual who fouls the air with his pretentious
pontificating, but who Inez starts to favor over the depressed Gil.
Midnight in Paris asks the
I-Pad crowd exactly why they might want to be seen cohabitating with writers
they may have no real intention of reading even in that literary pill of the
future, the digital download.