Movie Review: Midnight in Paris

They did it again, damnit! This has happened before, where a fantasy of mine that I made up in my own head goes rogue, makes a break for it, and starts posing as a film. Take Chocolat, for instance: our protagonist runs around her chocolate shop in the South of France wearing cute A-line dresses and being romanced by Johnny Depp? Really? And you're sure you haven't been in the more self-indulgent corners of my head recently?

Well, despite the fact that the protagonist is Owen Wilson, and therefore cannot run around in cute A-line dresses being romanced by Johnny Depp without things getting awkward, Woody Allen's latest offering, Midnight In Paris, is up to very similar tricks.

After a sigh-inducing opening montage of the City of Light, we cut to our protagonist, Gil (Wilson, as much a likable everyman as ever), a Hollywood screenwriter with dreams of writing great literature, on holiday in Paris with his fiance and her parents. They also bump into a couple who are friends of his fiance's. Between the deliciously bad chemistry between Gil and the fiance, and the pretensions of her friend (who is played brilliantly by Michael Sheen and presumably has a name in there somewhere, but is known, in and out of universe, almost solely as "the pedantic man"), these scenes are some of the funniest in the film, and that's saying something.

However, the romantic Gil soon grows tired of these antics, lost in his daydreams and yearning for the great days of Paris in the 1920s. He splits up from our merry gang, and while wandering the streets of Paris, is approached by a beautiful old car, beckoned in by a group of colorful revelers, and is transported to . . . Paris in the 1920s!

Needless to say, here is where both our protagonist and your humble reviewer begin to massively geek out. It becomes a sort of game, spot-the-absurdly-influential-artist-or-literary-figure, but highlights include Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, who critiques Gil's manuscript, Ernest Hemingway, who speaks primarily in hilarious monologues about courage and passion and death, Salvador Dali, whose moustache is less wacky than expected but whose dialogue more than makes up for it, and Pablo Picasso, who introduces our hero to his lovely latest model, an aspiring costume designer who yearns for La Belle Epoque. A very minor gripe, but must the lovely young Frenchwoman always be Marion Cotillard?

The plot zigzags between Gil's days with his fiance and company, and his nights carousing with the Lost Generation, and in a rare but welcome change, both locations and plotlines are equally enjoyable. The dialogue is perfect, and was clearly so much fun to write that at certain lines ("Adriana, these people don't have any antibiotics.") you can almost hear Woody Allen chuckling. I won't give away the twist at the ending, because it's such a fun surprise, but things resolve in a way that feels fresh, charming, and unexpectedly sweet and optimistic.

I would talk a little about the physical look of the film, but that would largely consist of me going OMG PARIS IS SO PRETTY, TWENTIES COSTUMES, SET PIECES, LOVELY CINEMATOGRAPHY ME WANT, ME WANT!!!!!! so I won't do that.

Admittedly, as a francophile/literary nerd who obsesses over bygone eras, I transcend "target market" so far as to have a bullseye painted on my forehead, so I am a bit biased. If this sort of thing is, well, not your sort of thing, or if you have a craving for a giant-robot movie or something, then don't see it. But as for my opinion: yes. Just . . . yes.