Scrambling the itinerary of the swingin' Sammy Cahn/Jimmy Van Heusen song "It's Nice to Go Trav'ling," which Frank Sinatra sang on his "Come Fly With Me" album, Woody Allen has now made three pictures in London, beginning with "Match Point." Allen has announced he'll next shoot in Rome.
Meanwhile we have Allen's latest, "Midnight in Paris," which goes where the title goes. It is a modest pleasure — a tasty comic fantasy, one of three or four Allen pictures from the last 15 years or so (amid scads of forgettable or worse efforts) that operate on a sound premise, expand upon it, cleverly, and prove that while Allen may not be reinventing any wheels, he still has it.
With "Midnight in Paris" it helps to have an Allen surrogate, the disenchanted Hollywood screenwriter played by Owen Wilson, who does more than remind the audience that it's difficult for a male lead in one of his films to sound like anyone other than Woody Allen. With his Texas drawl and his rather-be-surfing aura of genial distraction, Wilson makes everything go down easily here. Who would have guessed this actor would turn out to be an ideal conduit for Allen's nostalgic and romantic concerns?
The movie relies on two narrative conceits, one fresh, one not so much. In the not-so-much, Gil (Wilson) and his princessy, bratty fiancee (Rachel McAdams, warming up a cliche when and where she can) are visiting modern-day Paris with her folks. Gil yearns to chuck it all and return to the completion of his novel. He's a hopeless nostalgist who longs for Paris in the 1920s, and often daydreams about hobnobbing with Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, a painter or a filmmaker or a famous songwriter or two. Walking alone one night at midnight, Gil's visited by a gleaming Jazz Age limousine, carrying a madcap couple, the Fitzgeralds.
We'll keep some of the comic surprises a secret, except to say Marion Cotillard emerges as a beguiling object of desire and intimate of the famous. She has her own yearning for the past to complement Gil's. The occasionally wearying quality of the contemporary scenes in "Midnight in Paris" serves mainly to get the audience on Gil's side, though they really are more formulaic than necessary. The leap, or rather, glide into the realm of the fantastic is at once familiar and potent. Allen doesn't play much of it for broad comedy (though when Adrien Brody shows up as a certain flamboyant Surrealist, it's a delight), nor for the aggressive pathos of "The Purple Rose of Cairo." It explores a profitable middle ground between the two.
Allen dealt with a similar gimmick in his short story "The Kugelmass Episode," about an unhappily married city college professor who falls into the pages of Flaubert's "Madame Bovary." "Midnight in Paris" works in a mellower key. At its Cannes Film Festival premiere earlier this month, audiences warmed to it; already it has opened strongly in New York and Los Angeles. It's what you'd call a minor insight of a comedy; in fact, Wilson's character uses that phrase ("minor insight," that is) to describe what his nocturnal wanderings teach him about making the most of the present and embracing the one life we know we have.
An air of diminished expectations has hung over much of Allen's work since the 1990s. Here, the shadows and fog lift a little. Led by Wilson and Cotillard, the ensemble makes the most of the material that works, and makes the best of the rest of it.
"Midnight In Paris"
Grade: 3 1/2 out of 4 stars
Genres: Drama, Comedy
Running Time: 94 min
MPAA rating: PG-13
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