Midnight in Paris (2011)

Midnight in Paris is a charming new Woody Allen film about nostalgia. I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t a Woody Allen film about nostalgia sort of like a Stevie Wonder song about love? That is to say: nothing new. But for a writer-director holding a lifelong fascination with times and places that may exist only in his mind, this grown-up take on the subject matter is also refreshingly honest.

This time around, Allen leaves his beloved New York City for the City of Lights, Paris. That’s where he’s dropped off leading man Gil (Owen Wilson), a successful Hollywood screenwriter, known more for his hacky crowd pleasers than genuine artistic merit. Gil is on his second visit to Paris, this time with his materially obsessed fiancé, Inez (Rachel McAdams), and her Republican parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy). While there, they bump into Inez’s pseudo intellectual ex-flame, Paul (Michael Sheen). All Inez and the in-laws want to do is shop, eat in Paris’s most posh restaurants, and complain that there’s no place like Malibu. All Paul wants to do is show off his passing knowledge of every topic under the sun with frequent didactic digressions. Meanwhile, Gil, who is struggling with writing a novel about “a guy who works in a nostalgia shop,” wants only to wander the Montmartre, fantasizing about a time when the most creative minds of the Lost Generation kept salons and studios there.

One night, Gil is doing just that, while Inez has gone off to some hip nightclub with Paul. When the clock strikes midnight, a 1920s Peugeot comes rattling down the cobblestone street and a group of revelers, looking like they’re dressed for a Jazz Age-themed party, jump out and beckon him to join them. The next thing he knows, Gil is at a fete hosted by Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill), where Cole Porter is crooning “You’re the Top” and Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) is challenging him to a fistfight.

When Gil wakes in the morning, he’s back in his own time with his own shrewish, soon-to-be wife. But at each stroke of midnight on that winding road, his chariot arrives to transport him back to the Golden Age, bringing him to Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody) and eventually the beautiful Adriana (Marion Cotillard). A fashionista trained at Coco Chanel’s bobbin and stolen from Modigliani’s bed by Picasso, this muse knows talent when she sees it. And she falls instantly in love with both Gil and his novel.

As a movie about nostalgia, Midnight in Paris goes whole hog. It starts with Allen and cinematographer Darius Khondji’s (Evita, Seven) sumptuous, doting montage of Paris’s loveliest sites in the sort of bright watercolors that would make even Monet a little weak in the knees. It ends with the Eiffel Tower, all lit up and making the waters of the Seine sparkle like black diamonds below it. In between, every brilliant Cole Porter tune, shimmering flapper costume, sculpted Marcel wave, and overflowing Champagne coupe come together to paint a “gay Paree” so voluptuous, it’s almost pornographic. Heck, even the opening and closing credits–scroll-work surrounded black, stamped with white letters and scored by “Parlez Moi D’Amour”–are more romantic than any film should be able to handle.

But Mr. Allen’s razor-sharp wit and disciplined approach manage to keep all this whimsy from going soggy and limp. Perhaps it’s the way that he pushes Hemingway’s unending machismo just to the edge or makes a joke out of the curious workings of Dali’s mind, but Allen never forgets that this film is a comedy. And his star-studded cast never forgets it, either. Brody, who appears only very briefly, nails Dali with such surreal hilarity that I doubt we could have handled any more. Stoll, Sheen, and Bates also shine.

If you pay attention, the message of Midnight in Paris is that the past is no less ridiculous or shallow than the present; and that the present is no less inspiring than the past if you know how to look at it. In fact, one needs to look only as far as Allen’s own career to see how some things never change. Neurotic schlemiels and bright-eyed ingénues have been the man’s bread and butter for more than four decades. In Wilson and Cotillard, he has struck gold again. If you squint, you would almost swear you were looking at another Woody Allen character named Gil, originally played by Jeff Daniels in the similarly themed The Purple Rose of Cairo (where a movie character steps off the big screen and into real life New Jersey).

Midnight in Paris is not groundbreaking stuff. But it’s sweet and funny without ever once being crass. How’s that for nostalgia?