Woody Allen (2011)

Midnight in Paris begins with a longish sequence of familiar shots of the city – picture postcards so bland that the effect is oddly intriguing.  As in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen is evidently in love with the continental European location of his movie but whereas the Spanish settings of the earlier film were always sun-drenched, Allen subscribes to the lyrics of Cole Porter’s ‘I Love Paris’:  the place is just as loveable in the rain.  Allen was no doubt aware of how clichéd it is to describe Paris as magical in developing this supernatural story.  Gil Pender, a successful Hollywood screenwriter who’s struggling to finish his first novel, is visiting the French capital with his (American) fiancée Inez and having to spend time with her rich, right-wing parents and with a cultural know-all called Paul and his wife, old friends of Inez.  The protagonist of Gil’s novel works in a nostalgia shop and Gil himself hankers after Paris in the 1920s.  Getting away from his tedious companions one night, he hears midnight chime and sees a vintage, chauffeur-driven car pull up:  the people in the back of the car tell him to get in and come with them to a party.  When he gets there, the partygoers are dressed in twenties clothes; a man resembling Cole Porter is at the piano singing ‘Let’s Do It’; and Gil finds himself being introduced to a young couple called Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.  These people aren’t impersonators; Gil Pender is the latest in a long tradition of cinematic time travellers.   (He’s also kin to Cecilia, the heroine of The Purple Rose of Cairo, who went to movies to escape her grim waitressing job and marriage and charmed the hero of the film she was watching off the screen and into her life.)

Each night afterwards, Gil repeats the exercise on the stroke of twelve.  The luminaries he meets include, among others, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Luis Bunuel, T S Eliot, Josephine Baker and Pablo Picasso.  The last-named is having an affair with a beautiful young woman called Adriana; Gil finds himself falling in love with her and, with the tensions between him and the unlovable Inez increasing during each day, torn between past and present.  Adriana’s own favourite era is the Belle Epoque and, on what turns out to be their last night together, she and Gil are picked up by a hansom cab that transports them to Maxim’s and a meeting there with Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and Degas.  It’s while they’re in Maxim’s that Gil suddenly realises that you can’t live in the past and have to accept the present.  That doesn’t, however, mean accepting your lot in the present:  he breaks up with Inez, who turns out to have been sleeping with the egregious Paul.  Earlier in the film, while Inez and her mother were engaged in soul-destroying shopping in the most expensive stores of Paris in 2010, Gil wandered round a fleamarket where he struck up a friendly conversation with a beautiful young antiques dealer, with a great collection of Cole Porter records.  Chucked out of their swanky hotel suite by Inez and once again alone in Paris at night, Gil bumps into the antiques dealer.  She may share Gil’s passion for the twenties but she’s also the reason for living in the present.  Gil walks her home in a romantic downpour.

In Sweet and Lowdown Woody Allen wrote a main character he couldn’t really have played and Sean Penn was great in the role.  But that was a rarity:  Allen is still writing the male leads in his films as himself, down to the last characteristic detail.  (Gil Pender admits to Ernest Hemingway that his greatest fear is death.  Hemingway asserts that this fear disappears whenever a man is making love to a beautiful woman.  Gil replies with rueful honesty that it doesn’t disappear for him.)  Good actors like John Cusack have struggled in this role but Larry David’s confidence in Whatever Works showed an actor known primarily for comedy coping better and Owen Wilson as Gil fuels the theory that that’s what’s needed to crack the problem.  This isn’t just the best performance by an actor in the Woody Allen character to date:  it’s a triumph, and it makes Midnight in Paris.  One thing that helps is that, although his lines may have been written for Woody Allen, Wilson’s voice pattern is uncannily like the young James Stewart’s.  (A couple of times in the second half of the film, I closed my eyes briefly just to confirm that I might have been listening to Stewart.)  That might seem to complicate Wilson’s problems in being a distinctive personality but at least it confuses the issue of who he reminds you of.  Another thing that helps is Wilson’s evident enjoyment and sense of privilege playing the Allen role:  without his quite imitating the prototype, there’s an almost excited awareness in Wilson’s arm- and tense, nearly shrugging shoulder-movements of who originated them.  He’s physically comical in his own right too, as when Gil trudges round listening to Paul sounding off about art and architecture.  It’s the gait of a man who childishly wants to register his dissatisfaction but who can do so as obviously as he likes because he knows no one else is paying any attention to him.  (Wilson can also make an unremarkable line unaccountably funny, as when, in a frantic discussion with Inez and her mother about jewellery, he says, ‘Why is everyone suddenly getting so down on moonstone?’)  It’s when Gil goes back in time, though, that Wilson comes into his own – his sweet-natured quality and sense of distraction give Gil’s time-travel an emotional texture and truth that couldn’t have been achieved with Woody Allen in the role:  the conceit would have relied entirely on his incongruousness in the 1920s setting.  Owen Wilson blends in more:  Gil is somewhere he belongs as well as somewhere he doesn’t belong.

Midnight in Paris needs this winning central performance because the twenties episodes, although mildly amusing and very pretty to look at, are tepid.  Too often, the only joke comes in the moment of identifying – or name-dropping – the artistic celebrities Gil encounters:  the comedy isn’t followed through either in the writing or in the performances.  (The night when Gil’s picked up from his usual spot in the street by T S Eliot epitomises this:   once Gil and we are introduced to Eliot – whose time in Paris was actually early in the previous decade – we never see or hear from him again.)  There are exceptions:  Adrien Brody has terrific zest and momentum in his cameo as Dali; Adrian de Van is amusingly humourless as Bunuel; Alison Pill tries hard as Zelda.  But there are some duds too – Corey Stoll as Hemingway, Tom Hiddleston as Fitzgerald (Hiddleston is the latest example of Woody Allen’s recent penchant for casting dreary British actors).  Although Kathy Bates has a likeable bossiness as Gertrude Stein, she just doesn’t seem to be the same actress when she’s not a contemporary character (although she’s better here than in Chéri).  You somehow don’t expect actors playing famous names in an utterly unreal comedy to be constrained in the way they sometimes are in straight biopic but some of there are here.  Perhaps it’s to Marion Cotillard’s advantage that Adriana either wasn’t a real person or at least isn’t a well-known one.  Cotillard shot to international fame thanks to an overpraised performance in a terrible picture (La vie en rose) but she was one of the few reasons to sit through Nine:  she’s effortlessly and powerfully beautiful here and, apart from Wilson and Brody, the only performer in the times past sequences who seems to be drawing on her own personality to animate the character she’s playing.

For the most part, the playing in the 2010 scenes has more edge; the problem here is that Woody Allen’s characterisation of materialistic Americans has gotten so mean-spirited that the satire is mechanical and thin.  In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the Rebecca Hall character had a dull fiancé phoning her from Wall Street every so often.  Here, when Inez’s parents go to see a movie in Paris it’s an inane American comedy; they complain about the French food and suspect boeuf bourguignon as the cause of the father’s coronary scare.  Mimi Kennedy is what you’d expect as the mother but Kurt Fuller plays the bellowing father with a good deal more dry style than the part deserves.  Allen’s lack of sympathy towards Inez makes this bigger role a naturally bigger problem and Rachel McAdams, although she’s proficient, doesn’t make Inez’s brittleness funny and can’t do anything to make us believe Gil would be in a supposedly long-term relationship with this girl:  he’s too amiably indolent to be attracted to the looks and wealth of someone so wearyingly disagreeable.  Michael Sheen is much more successful as the vile Paul.  With a nasty beard and a worse smile that seems no less attached to his face, Sheen gives Paul’s ego a hideous, complacent dynamism.  Nina Arianda does well in the obvious role of his foolishly admiring wife.

Who knows why Woody Allen cast Carla Bruni and it serves him right that too much interest in the film, at least before it was properly released, centred round her alleged inadequacies but in fact she is good, playing a tour guide, in both her key scenes.  Standing with the four tourists beside The Thinker, she politely disagrees with Paul about the biographical facts about Rodin.  (When Gil takes her side, claiming he knows it from a two-volume life he read recently, Inez asks him as an aside when he read it and he replies, ‘Why on earth would I read a biography of Rodin?’  This struck me as a very funny line – certainly Owen Wilson makes it very funny.)   Later on, Gil asks the guide to translate into English a 1920s memoir, written by Adriana, which he picks up in 2010 from one of the bookstalls beside the Seine. It’s music to Gil’s ears (and evidence that Woody Allen’s world-beating sexual magnetism remains intact even though he’s no longer on screen) that Adriana acknowledged in writing that she fancied the young American would-be novelist more than all of Braque, Picasso and Hemingway put together.  I don’t know whether Carla Bruni was given the book to translate blind (Sally wondered if she might have been) but she does it with naturalness and charm.  Allen’s casting of Léa Seydoux as Gabrielle, the girl from the fleamarket, is spot on.  You wonder how Gil will survive back in the present but Seydoux’s luminous prettiness provides an answer which is at least momentarily convincing.

This is in spite of the fact that the moment of Gil’s epiphany in Maxim’s is an all-round anti-climax.  His sudden understanding that you can’t live in the past amounts to his agreeing with Paul’s earlier dismissal of ‘golden age thinking’ and there’s no ironic snap to Gil’s having to accept the wisdom of his windbag bête noire.  Woody Allen has become keen late in life in conveying the-moral-of-the-story of his films in a baldly uninteresting way; in this case, it’s also the escape route for the plot he’s written.  According to the current Rotten Tomatoes rating (92% positive from 149 reviews), this new film – the forty-first he’s written and directed – has broken free of the recent division of opinion between those who see a new picture as the latest evidence of Allen’s terminal decline (as if many directors have been on the up in their seventies) and those who perceive a belated return to form.  Midnight in Paris is a lovely idea but it’s an idea that’s not developed with much imagination or tension; there are lots of good lines but plenty of flat patches too.

Yet the film is deeply appealing in several ways.  First, what Owen Wilson does here is a breakthrough both in his own career and in the Allen oeuvre.  Second, the nostalgic impulse behind the piece is strong enough both to sustain it and to withstand its inevitable but disappointing resolution; the lack of explanation of Gil’s fantastic experience – it happens because he needs it to happen – is an important element in that.   Third, you can sit watching the film and thinking, as I did, that it’s far from great – but at the same time realise how much you take Woody Allen for granted.  When I saw You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger a few months ago I was very dispirited; I can’t think of another Allen film which I’ve found both so poor and so dislikeable.  The juxtaposition of Tall Dark Stranger and Midnight in Paris makes you realise anew what’s usual when you watch a Woody Allen picture:  you take it as read that you’ll be thoroughly entertained; the wit of the writing and the acting is a given.  You find things wrong secure in the assumption of how much will be right.

7 October 2011