Midnight in Paris

This winning confection of magical realism and pragmatic themes could have been Woody Allen’s greatest film in 22 years. The film’s enchanting premise—in which a young Hollywood writer is transported nightly by vintage auto to rub shoulders with his literary idols in a romanticized 1920s Paris—is ideal material for an artist whose work has always harkened wistfully back to a lost golden era. As the decades have worn on, Allen’s cinematic perspective has felt ever more frozen in a fanciful past that never actually existed—sometimes to great comic effect, as in 1994’s Bullets Over Broadway, and sometimes with embarrassingly flat results, like 2001’s The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. Here, Allen has a perfect opportunity to both revel in and shine a cynical light on his rose-colored nostalgia.  Sadly, the promise of the movie is undercut by the lackluster sloppiness that has become as much a hallmark of the once-great filmmaker as his black horn-rimmed glasses. It feels shallow and like a wasted opportunity.

Part of the film takes place in the present day, and Allen populates it with the type of flimsy characters that exemplify far too much of his recent work. Some of these roles are funny, like Michael Sheen’s pompous blowhard, but the whiny girlfriend played by Rachel McAdams is a two-dimensional piece of cardboard that is only there to justify the escapist fantasy. In fact, almost all the “present-day” scenes in the film fall flat. One could say this is an intentional choice designed to make the descent into the magical past more dynamic, but that would just be making an excuse for lazy writing. The scenes that do take place in the past are far more entertaining, but even they are not what they could have been in the hands of a more engaged Allen. The encounters with the literary titans of the 1920s feel cribbed from several of Allen’s old short stories, and while many of the ideas for these scenes are great, in execution, they rarely, if ever, equal the comedic and romantic grandeur of Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) which blended fantasy and reality in a similar but more effective, way.

Many actors have stood in for the on-screen Allen when he has deemed himself too old to credibly play a role. This time he has cast Owen Wilson, and, surprisingly, Wilson turns out to be the greatest Allen surrogate ever.  Rather than coming off as a cheap Woody Allen impersonator (as Kenneth Branagh, Jason Biggs, Will Farrell, and Larry David did in Celebrity, Anything Else, Melinda and Melinda, and Whatever Works, respectively), Wilson effortlessly combines Allen’s uptight, neurotic characterization and halting “New Yawk”-inflected speaking style with the winsome slacker persona he has used in all of his own films.  This creates a fresh character; a successful hybrid of both screen personas. It’s a good thing that Wilson is such a joy to watch because he's in almost every scene, but his terrific performance makes the film feel like even more of a missed opportunity.  It’s as if Allen had all the perfect ingredients for a masterpiece and squandered them.

It may sound like I’m being too hard on my favorite filmmaker of all time, and perhaps I am. But as a devotee of his work, I know what he is capable of when he is really trying, and this film is well below par. Midnight In Paris has been Allen’s most financially successful film ever and his most well-reviewed film in nearly two decades, but this says less about how stellar this movie is and more about the current dearth of good cinema. Hardly any mainstream filmmakers are making quality entertainment for people over 40 these days, so when something like this does come along, we all flock to it and overpraise it as if it were the Second Coming. In actuality, though, it is merely a faint shadow of what we really want.

Woody Allen is a filmmaker who is driven to keep working, and I will always admire that about him. But in his middle years, this work ethic was coupled with an obvious desire to make each of his films as good as they could possibly be, even though he was often disappointed with the final outcomes. In the '70s and '80s, to keep his films fresh and vibrant, Allen constantly revised them on the page, while shooting, while editing, and then again while reshooting. In recent interviews, Allen has repeatedly expressed a belief that the success of his films is all about luck and has almost nothing to do with him. This is a remarkable perspective in a profession whose other practitioners tend to believe fervently in the unique power of their singular visions. But the tragic downside to Allen's fatalistic humility is that he treats all his ideas with the same casual, workaday attitude, so when a truly exceptional idea crosses his mind, it gets no special treatment and is merely processed through the same artistic assembly line as all his lesser whims.

Comparing Allen to another veteran filmmaker with a similar work ethic reveals what might have been. Clint Eastwood also approaches his films with a distinct lack of preciousness and perfectionism and a let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may attitude about the success of his work.  But when Eastwood read David Webb Peoples’ script for Unforgiven, he recognized that it was special and accordingly treated it with more care, time, and effort than he would normally devote to a project. The resulting film redefined a genre and remains not only one of Eastwood's greatest films but one of the best pictures ever made. Midnight in Paris could have been for the Woody Allen Comedy what Unforgiven was for the Clint Eastwood Western: an exploration and definitive summary of nearly all the themes and conventions of a particular filmmaker and genre. Instead, Allen's film is just another half-hearted attempt to make us laugh a little and think a little. Almost no one makes movies like this anymore, and I’ll take what I can get, but this film, more than any other of Allen’s recent offerings, makes me long for this director's own golden years. Not only do I remember those years as being better, but since films live on in reality and not just in memory, I know they really were better.