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Midnight In Paris (2011)

Director: Woody Allen

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26 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

Tides rise and fall, planets spin on their axes and each new year brings a fresh film by Woody Allen. Maybe fresh isn’t the right word. Artistic crises, monied folk, metropolitan settings, romantic hiccups, women holding back men, or vice versa – we know what to expect from Allen, who turned 75 last year. The biggest surprise these days is where the director of ‘Annie Hall’ and ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’ will take his travelling company next.

For ‘Midnight in Paris’, he opts for the French capital for the second time following ‘Everyone Says I Love You’, and sets it mostly in the present but with some mischievous hops to the city in the 1920s and the 1890s. It’s a simple, amusing moral yarn with the odd hint of Allen’s comic anarchism of old. It’s familiar, but breezily so, and the cast appear much more at ease than the recent ‘You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger’. Owen Wilson especially makes a charming, laidback Allen alter ego.

‘Midnight in Paris’ is a love letter to a city and, like ‘Manhattan’, opens with an adoring montage, set to jazz, of the city by day and night. As in so many of Allen’s films, our troubled hero is a writer: Gil (Wilson, who adopts the classic slacks-and-check-shirt Woody look) is on holiday in Paris with his fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams), and her rich, conservative parents. While Inez prefers the company of her folks or her friends, Paul (Michael Sheen), a preening academic, and his wife, Carol (Nina Arianda), Gil is struggling to complete a book he hopes will mark his crossover from Hollywood hack to novelist and wanders the street by night looking for inspiration.

It’s on those journeys that he finds himself, by way of hitching a lift in a classic Peugeot, in a Paris of another age, mixing in the 1920s with the likes of Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston), Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody) and Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll). It sounds crazy, but the boldness of Gil’s late-night trips to the past give the film a lift out of the more tired arena of Gil’s romantic and creative crises in the present. Allen and his cast get the tone right, the actors playing the historical characters with a spirited comic energy and Wilson well suited to the role of the doe-eyed, bemused writer wallowing in his cultural heaven. Marion Cotillard and Léa Seydoux offer pretty but passive support as Gil’s alternative romantic options in the past and present, while Carla Bruni has a shaky cameo as a tour guide.

There are ideas afoot about idolising past cultural figures and falsely imagining golden ages, but Gil’s line ‘I’m having an insight now, it’s a minor one’ best sums up the film’s simple but honest vision. Allen aims for mild surprise and amusement rather than anything more heady. It’s all very recognisable but not tired, and the film’s lightly-played time-travelling element gives ‘Midnight in Paris’ a hint of boldness lacking in too many of Allen’s recent films. It’s fun and it’s most welcome.

Author: Dave Calhoun

Time Out London Issue 2146: 6 – 12 October, 2011

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User reviews of this film

jim said...

Posted on Mar 22 2012 23:50 really loved this film as it panders to my fantasy of stepping back in time and meeting the famous and owen wilson perfect in his role but you can see woody allen in his performance.

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stevhors said...

Posted on Feb 12 2012 22:21 If you want a perfectly OK light and sweet escapist film then this is for you, but don't expect a full three course meal, it's not meant to be that. Mediocre acting and weakish screenplay are offset by beautiful evocations of Paris as a romantic city making a quite passable movie experience and much better than the dreadful Vicky Christina Barcelona; choice of music is fine and well integrated as well.

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pumpyinabox said...

Posted on Feb 09 2012 02:44 After hearing so many good things about this film, I couldn't believe my eyes and ears - it's one of the worst films I've ever seen. I'm glad to see that others share my view. Woody Allen strikes out a lot, and this was definitely a strike out. One of his worst.

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wildkatwriter said...

Posted on Jan 20 2012 11:09 I have a theory about this film. Woody Allen wrote the script when he was about 15 and had just discovered these literary, artistic and cinematic greats. And instead of re-reading it when he was 18, realising that it stank to high heaven and burning it, he's made it into a move and inflicted it on all of us. Either that, or aliens have stolen his brain and he's forgotten how to write movies.
Because, let's face it, this is HORRIBLE. Shallow, self-indulgent, sycophantic, misogynist, pretentious crap. By the time Owen Wilson's struggling writer has wittered about Paris and how lovely it is for five minutes, I wanted to punch him in the face, but I realised he's meant to be the hero and we're actually meant to CARE about whether he succeeds in his quest to stop being a Hollywood hack (biting the hand that feeds you there, Woody) and become a proper writer, and find a woman who admires him and presumably doesn't answer back. It has nothing to say about the luminaries it wheels on - they all just do a turn. Heminway's intense, Zeda F is a flake, Scott Fitzgerald is a nonentity (noooo!), Gertrude Stein is forthright, Picasso does weird paintings and so on. It's one of two fanboy movies this year (the other was the much more bearable MY WEEK WITH MARILYN). This has lots of text and no subtext, no subtlety and - tragic for the master of comedies of manners - no humour that's not heavy-handed. It's a film about Paris like NOTTING HILL is a film about London - there is the tourist Paris where all streets are cobbled, all roads lead to the Seine or have a view of the Eiffel Tower, and there is nobody who isn't white. And okay, we writers all fantasise about our literary hero/ine sitting us down and saying, "This novel of yours, it's really promising You've really got something there..." but we don't actually put that scene in a sodding FILM!! and expect people to pay money to watch it. Owen Wilson's a good comic actor, but here he's playing Woody's avatar and does Woody's voice spot-on - just enough to be really, really annoying. Do yourself a favour: read TENDER IS THE NIGHT or THE FIRST FORTY-NINE and give this film a very wide berth. Adolescent rubbish written by a 75-year old who should be old enough to know better

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Eeyore said...

Posted on Oct 29 2011 13:20 So desperately bad I considered walking out - and then at the end wished that I had. It's sad to see Allen degenerating into such over-sentimentalised tosh. Hackneyed locations, cardboard cutout characters, and unsympathetic ultra-rich and ultra-stupid principles do not make a good film.

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Ronan said...

Posted on Oct 22 2011 16:12 One of the worst movies I've ever seen. A bad idea badly executed. Whoever cast Owen Wilson as the lead must be insane. Maybe it was Woody himself. Anyway if you're thinking of going to see it don't. Save yourself a long 1hr 34 mins.

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Jools said...

Posted on Oct 20 2011 15:55 This film served as a great vehicle for some audience members to laugh extra loud to show they got the artistic and literary references. Apart from that, pleasant enough, a bit like an upgraded version of 'Goodnight Sweetheart'. I kept expecting Nicholas Lyndhurst to pop up in a bar.

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Heather said...

Posted on Oct 18 2011 16:22 I adored this film. If you don't like Woody Allen don't go and see his films. Duh. I got completely lost in the Parisian time warped world. The music helped, beautiful. Woody Allen isn't known for his seriousness and the cameos proved that. Adrien Brody was hilarious. Oh Paris...

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miles said...

Posted on Oct 18 2011 14:27 all that archgate said is true and it still is worst than that too

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Alfred said...

Posted on Oct 17 2011 18:27 How lovely - no violence or sex - just pure fantasy and lovely to look at - If only real life was like this. Only Woody Allen can make you feel so good after watching this fantasy.

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Mike said...

Posted on Oct 17 2011 00:09 I had a major problem with this film. Maybe it's something to do with not liking Owen Wilson. I've loved all the previous Woody Allen films I've seen. (How many times have I seen Manhattan? How loud did I howl with laughter during Deconstructing Harry? The shoot out in the helium factor in Broadway Danny Rose ...). Let's face it, no one does Woody like Woody. I gave it an hour then walked.

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charliefarley said...

Posted on Oct 16 2011 20:39 Best Woody Allen film for years. Light and frothy, some delightful cameos and hugely entertaining.

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Amanda said...

Posted on Oct 16 2011 10:15 Worst movie of the year. I wanted to walk out but I was with a friend so I felt bad leaving her but she thought it was a load of rubbish too! No romance, no laughable moments.. Pretentious and had no plot!

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Ricky said...

Posted on Oct 14 2011 17:19 Very disappointing. Almost all the characters are tedious cliches. After the positive reviews I expected to laugh more than once.

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Mick Hackett said...

Posted on Oct 14 2011 12:54 The Rachel McAdams character was normal-at least much more so than our hero, who acted like a thick zombie! Wanting to live in Paris in order to write a romantic novel about a magic shop and fawning over all these fantasy writers like a love-sick schoolgirl1 He's the five-year old, whereas I'm the life-hardened realist, unable to accept such sentimental nonsense,which is, I'm sure how the real Hemingway would have regarded the American ninny.

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