Film Diary 2011: Midnight In Paris

Owen Wilson makes a surprisingly good proxy for Allen in the role of Gil, a Hollywood hack screenwriter who has taken some time off of polishing blockbusters to try and write the novel he's always had inside him. For Gil, Paris is the perfect place to do this, though he'd far prefer the city in the 1920s. He's only here on holiday with his fiance Inez (Rachel McAdams), her parents are in town (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy, both wonderfully insufferable), and they bump into Inez's friends Paul (Michael Sheen) and Carol (Nina Arianda); Paul is an 'all-knowing' intellectual whilst Carol is practically his groupie.

Increasingly frustrated with the near non-stop, stuck-up attitudes of those around him, Gil yearns to just 'take in' Paris and on a slightly drunken stroll finds a curious vintage car pulling up alongside him and its inhabitants whisk him off to a party. Very quickly Gil feels out of place and this is exacerbated when he meets the party's hosts Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Alison Pill and Tom Hiddleston), he hears Cole Porter (Yves Heck) sing live and discusses literature with Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll).

Of course, his fiance thinks he's crazy, he tries to prove he isn't, she stomps off and Gil is whisked on further jaunts to the 1920s, his own 'golden age', where he begins to fall for Adriana (Marion Cotillard).

Allen and Wilson handle Gil's time-travelling with a laidback wit and giddy excitement, allowing the slightly corny concept to be accepted with relative ease and restraint. Less well handled are Wilson's frustrations in the modern era, sure it's easy to dislike Inez's parents and Michael Sheen's 'pseudo-intellectual' is familiarly loathsome, but there doesn't seem to be many redeeming features to Inez herself and one wonders how these two ever got together in the first place, sure, it's fine to accept that someone could end up with the wrong person but there is something a little too easy about how unlikable almost all the contemporary Americans around Gil are.

Fortunately the 1920s set sequences are simply lovely, buoyed in general by a perfect little ensemble, Adrien Brody inparticular is very charming as Salvador Dali, though, for me, Corey Stoll's Hemingway steals the entire film, his delightfully dry diatribes on true literature and his drunken outburst both comic highlights. Allen, alongside the brilliant cinematographer Darius Khondji, has no trouble selling the magic of Paris, as seen through Gil's eyes, and, in a laidback opening montage, does a great job of setting up and bursting that very bubble.

Ultimately though the film lacks a certain something, its thematic conclusions are handed to the viewer rather awkwardly, when audiences would have come to the same summation on their own good graces, it doesn't quite need to be spelled out as thickly and drily as it is. Likewise having Gil's contemporaries be so detestable strips the film of a lot of drama in relation to Gil making his mind up. In a way that is reasonably reflective of reality, sometimes the decisions we should make are so obvious, yet we, for a variety of reasons, don't follow our heart.

Regardless of those quibbles this is an enjoyable, whimsical and - at times - quite magical little picture.

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