Big Screen Peter: Midnight in Paris

 

Editor’s note: Peter Lewis has agreed to use whatever it is you call his writing style to provide some measure of analysis to those folks who still go to a theater to see a movie.

review by Peter Lewis

Romantics have a tendency to beatify history. Judiciously, they dust the unseemly bits under a rug and exalt a subset of its existence. This nostalgia, this perversion of reality gives many a sense that everything great has already happened, that everything of import is lost somewhere in the past.

In many ways, the premise of Woody Allen’s latest film, “Midnight in Paris,” is based around this propensity to romanticize an era. But it is more than just an examination of our foibles as romantic dreamers, it is a ironic sniper shot.

With the beauty of Paris as a backdrop, Allen seeks to lay bare our common tendency to settle. Through denial and endless equivocating, we bumble through life with misplaced fears. Our delusions of reality create a void and life takes a tinge of eternal disappointment, one that perhaps causes the romanticizing of another time or place. Life slips through our fingers because we can’t quite stomach reality.

Our lead equivocator is Gil Pender (Owen Wilson). He’s a successful screenwriter on vacation with his fiancee, Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her parents John and Helen (Kurt Fuller & Mimi Kennedy respectively). From the outset, it’s painfully obvious that Gil and Inez don’t quite mix. He’s an unredeemable romantic, while she is … well, unnervingly pragmatic would be the polite way to phrase it, but a more crass man than myself might out and out call her a bitch.

The young pair run into two friends, Paul (Michael Sheen) and Carol (Nina Arianda). The early portions of the film are given over to their outings in Paris, with the pedant Paul droning on about everything under the sun and the ladies eating it up. Unable to stand the oppressive presence of Paul, Gil strikes out on his own one night and, through a series of mind-bending adventures, begins to understand the reality of his situation.

While not as convincingly cerebral as Allen, Owen Wilson is quite apt as his approximation, Gil. He bumbles and rambles. He’s self-effacing and endearing. And McAdams as Inez is equally apropos. She plays the self-involved rich girl quite well (so well in fact, one can’t help but wonder how their relationship endured toward the point of betrothal). But this pair is just the start, the entire film is as well-scripted as it is well-acted. From top to bottom, from the pointedly intense to the absurd, each player seemed tailor-made for their role.

And this helps give the film a whimsical air, one that offsets Allen’s heady jokes and esoteric gags. Those “blagues” fill out the flavor of the film and never really override it.

In many respects, “Midnight in Paris” is one of Allen’s most accessible and charming films. Despite the life of ease and unseemly wealth exhibited by the lead characters, “Midnight in Paris” is a very sweet and approachable tale. It’s a man trying to come to grips with the choices he’s made in life. They haven’t all been necessarily right, but they have been choices. And it’s the maturity of the director that shines through with that realization.

In the end, things are what we make of them. Do we hide behind a veil of excuses or do we take a step toward our dreams? “Midnight in Paris” might not give you the answer you seek, but it will give you a few good laughs and force you to appraise the cost of your choices.

• Midnight in Paris is playing at the Malco Cinema 12 in Fort Smith. Link here for time and ticket info.

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