Midnight in Paris - Woody Allen

Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, which has earned the director his best reviews in years, premiered in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was the opening night selection, and what an appropriate selection it was. It's not set in any real Paris but in a Paris of the imagination, a romantic retreat of art and culture and history, filtered through the wide-eyed nostalgia of an American writer (Owen Wilson), who is periodically transported to the City of Lights in the 1920s, when it was a bohemian mecca filled with chic parties attended by artistic icons like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Pablo Picasso.

Wilson, whose aw-shucks persona is put to good use here, plays Gil, a successful Hollywood screenwriter who longs to be a novelist, but he doesn't have the support of his fiancee, Inez, whose insufferable personality is slightly mitigated by the fact that she's played by Rachel McAdams, a lovely and charismatic actress who at least makes us understand why Gil might have been drawn to her in the first place; low self-esteem explains why he stays with her. She's casually belittling, not out of cruelty but, perhaps even worse, as if his inadequacy is a matter of fact.

Inez wishes Gil were more like Paul (Michael Sheen), who is in Paris to guest-lecture at the Sorbonne (ooh la la!) and invites Inez and Gil to visit Versailles with him, which is less an invitation to the palace than an invitation to listen to him talk about the palace. He invites them to many activities he knows a lot about; surely he doesn't know everything about everything, so we must assume he only visits places where he can impress with his scholarship. I think most viewers will recognize the type. Paul is knowledgeable without really seeming to care about the things he knows. Knowledge, for him, seems to be a means of demonstrating his superiority. He's not interested in teaching you, he wants to one-up you.

That's the key difference between the two men. Gil is less knowledgeable, but he has genuine passion, ambition, and when at midnight one evening he is transported into the past, he expresses awe. We suspect that if Paul were introduced to artists from the past he might instead respond by correcting them on the historical facts of their own lives. Whether Gil is truly traveling through time or is simply imagining the journey is unimportant (though we get a few solid indications that it's real). It's a whimsical flight of fancy that allows Allen to explore the subject of nostalgia, not just for a specific time or place but as it occurs in all of us. He touches on a restless, impossible yearning for a life experience more fulfilling than one's own, but ultimately, Allen concludes, there's no such thing as a golden age.

It's a gently insightful film, light but not lightweight, filled with a joyous admiration of the past but without sanctifying the past or its artistic figures. Allen is playful in his depiction of the legendary writers and painters: Corey Stoll steals scenes as Ernest Hemingway, whose pseudo-wisdom about life and death, writing, truth, and the importance of properly making love to a woman is so self-serious it's quite funny, and Adrien Brody is pleasingly loose and loopy in a cameo as Salvador Dali.

During his adventure through time, Gil meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a Parisian who acts as lover and muse to famous artists like Picasso and Modigliani but falls in love with Gil because he seems guileless and genuine, like no one else in her world. She too longs for an era not her own. It's not a love story between people, per se, but between two different time periods. It's irreconcilable, because no matter how much you desire the past you can never truly have it. Nostalgia, we learn, is the ultimate form of unrequited love.

This is a terrific film. It works as well as it does because its bittersweet theme deepens Allen's characters and signature writing style, and his fanciful vision of literary history is so transporting that theaters running the film would be smart to install book kiosks in the lobby. I'm aware of most of the writers and artists featured in the film but not familiar with all of their work, so as soon as the film was over I downloaded T.S. Eliot onto my Kindle. It was free, making me wonder if the real golden age was the era of public domain.