Midnight in Paris (Spoilers!)

So the other night I watched Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen's latest writing and directing venture, starring Owen Wilson and featuring an ensemble cast that, if written down, would make you leave this page before you finished the list. So I'll just hit the high points. Owen Wilson plays Gil, a Hollywood writer who idolizes the Lost Generation of the 1920's. He and his fiance Inez (played by Rachel McAdams) vacation to Paris with her parents, where they meet up with some of Inez's old friends, one of which is an old flame of hers. Hating everything about the experience, Gil decides to start taking long walks by himself at night, where he discovers that he can travel to 1920's Paris by being picked up in a particular spot by an antique car at midnight every night. He travels and meets F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dali, and others while falling in love with a French girl named Adriana. His two lives eventually start careening towards each other, and shenanigans ensue. The end.

Now, if this sounds like a standard romantic comedy-fantasy to you, that's because, on paper, it kind of is. The ingredients are all there, from the snooty, successful antagonist (a perfectly douchey Michael Sheen) to the hopeless love triangle created by Wilson, McAdams, and Marion Cotillard's Adriana. What stands this apart, at least in my eyes, is the fact that this movie is only about half romantic comedy. The other half is a character study of what makes Gil tick as a person. He comes face-to-face with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, has his novel looked at by Gertrude Stein, and immerses himself in an era he has idolized. Woody Allen does something interesting with Gil's travels by reversing the traditional portrayals of the characters. Typically, the characters of the past are caricatures of the personality traits they were famous for, and the modern characters would be more grounded and realistic. This is the opposite in Midnight in Paris. All of the modern day characters are modern-day stereotypes: the Tea Party rich dad, the disconnected rich mother, the spoiled daughter fiance, the pseudo-intellectual ass. In the past, however, the surly Hemingway is over-the-top, yet grounded enough to let you believe he is a real person. Adriana isn't just some promiscuous Parisian girl. She's a real person with hopes and dreams, triumphs and pitfalls. This reversal is supposed to portray Gil's greater attachment to the 1920's than to the modern day and as a result he comes to understand the timelessness of the human reaction to nostalgia and the damaging effects of living in the past.

All in all, Midnight in Paris is a standard-fare romantic comedy, but a good character-driven film. I give it 6 obscure art references out of 10.