Midnight in Paris Review

Midnight in Paris Review

The thought of visiting your favorite time period, and visiting with the visionaries of the time is a concept that everyone considers at one time in their life. The new Woody Allen film, Midnight in Paris, is an insightful and charming look at this concept.

Owen Wilson plays Gil, a hack screenwriter who dreams of becoming a great novelist. He visits Paris with his Fiancee (Rachel McAdams) and her family.Visiting Paris feeds his dream of becoming a great writer in the most poetic city in the world.  He is in love with the notion of living in 1920s Paris, surrounded by the brilliance of expatriate writers and artists, and of course all this must be in the rain.

One evening after a wine tasting, a slightly inebriated and lost Gil finds himself alone on a Parisian street corner, as the clock strikes twelve.  As the bells chime, a 1920s Peugeot, pulls up and transports Gil to the 1920s.  When Gil realizes that he is actually visiting the past, experiencing his wildest fantasies, he becomes immediately entranced. He basks in the ambiance, and soaks in the wisdom of his idealistic golden age. Gil continues to visit the 1920s meeting and interacting with the contemporary visionaries of the time. The film is difficult to describe but it is lovely and the less you know the better. It is full of insight and quotable soundbites, and you will leave the theater with an appetite for life.

Woody Allen films are a genre in itself. He has made 41 films and all of them have familiar elements, from the credits to the characters you can find benchmarks and touchstones in all of them. His films are almost always personal to him in some way shape or form, and hit or miss, they provide us with some insight into his genius.  In this case, you have to believe that Woody Allen, has fallen in love with Paris, and this love has given inspiration to a beautifully insightful and philosophical film experiences in the last decade. Equal parts entertaining and literate, unlike so many movies today, so expect to be challenged and stimulated intellectually.

A major theme in the movie is that "nostalgia is denial of a painful present." The thought that even the best of times are only beautiful in hindsight. Of course there is also the notion that those who are nostalgic for the greatness of times past are short sighted in realizing that the time they live in will one day be nostalgia for some future romantic, who would love to live in our time, especially in the rain.