Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris runs 94 minutes and wastes almost none of them. The film follows Gil Pender, a screenwriter on vacation in Paris with his fiancée’s wealthy family. Intoxicated after a night of wine tasting, he walks back to his hotel alone, and at midnight a 1920s car pulls up and drops him at a party for Jean Cocteau. Every night after, the same thing happens. It is a fantasy comedy that takes nostalgia as its subject and then quietly argues against it.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Classics.
Gil Pender Cannot Finish His Novel
Gil is played by Owen Wilson, and his problem is not writer’s block exactly. He is struggling to finish his debut novel, about a man who works in a nostalgia shop, and he wants to move to Paris. Inez, played by Rachel McAdams, dismisses the idea. She is materialistic, and the film makes the gap between their goals wider every time Gil disappears.
The trip includes her parents, John and Helen, played by Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy. It also includes Paul, an old college friend of Inez’s, played by Michael Sheen, who speaks with great authority and questionable accuracy about French history. Paul annoys Gil and impresses Inez. That is the whole joke, and it lands.
A Car Pulls Up at Midnight
The mechanic is simple. Gil walks. A car pulls up. The 1920s happen. He does not control it, and he cannot explain it, and the film does not try to explain it either.
The first night, he lands at a party for Jean Cocteau. Zelda Fitzgerald, bored, pushes her husband Scott and Gil to leave with her. They go to a cafe and run into Ernest Hemingway and Juan Belmonte. After the Fitzgeralds leave, Gil and Hemingway talk about writing, and Hemingway offers to show Gil’s novel to Gertrude Stein.
Tom Hiddleston plays F. Scott Fitzgerald. Alison Pill plays Zelda. Corey Stoll plays Hemingway. Kathy Bates plays Gertrude Stein.
Gil goes to fetch his manuscript and returns to 2010, where the cafe is now a laundromat. The next night he tries again, bringing Inez, but she goes back to the hotel before midnight. So he goes alone.
Adriana Longs for an Earlier Era
Back in the 1920s, Gil accompanies Hemingway to visit Gertrude Stein, who is critiquing Pablo Picasso’s new painting of his lover Adriana. Marion Cotillard plays Adriana, a costume designer who has also had affairs with Amedeo Modigliani and Georges Braque.
Gil becomes drawn to her. She hears the first line of his novel and praises it. She also admits she has always longed for the past. That confession is the hinge of the film, and it is easy to miss on a first watch because the scene is played so lightly.
Adrien Brody shows up as Salvador Dalí. Carla Bruni appears as a museum guide. Nina Arianda plays Carol, Paul’s wife.
The 1920s scenes carry the film:
- A party for Jean Cocteau, where Gil first arrives
- A cafe where Hemingway and Belmonte are drinking
- Gertrude Stein’s apartment, where she judges Picasso’s painting
- Adriana’s confession that she has always longed for the past
Every Era Thinks the Last One Was Better
Nostalgia is the target. Gil romanticizes the 1920s. The film’s point is that longing for an earlier era is a trap, and that Gil’s own nostalgia is the thing he has to see past. It is not a subtle argument, but it is a real one, and the movie earns it.
Midnight in Paris premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and was released in the United States on May 20, 2011. It was produced by the Spanish group Mediapro and Allen’s US-based Gravier Productions. It opened to critical acclaim, and in 2012 it won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay. It was nominated for three other Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director and Best Art Direction.
Allen wrote and directed the film, and the structure is clean: one man, one city, one hour, one recurring door. The tagline promises that anything can happen in the city of light, and the film delivers on that without ever letting the fantasy run the story. Gil’s choices in 2010 still matter.
Inez and Paul Are the Weak Link
What holds the film back is Inez and her family. They are written as obstacles rather than people, and McAdams gets little to do but disapprove. Paul exists to be wrong about history, which is funny once and thinner the second time. The 2010 scenes are the weakest part of a movie that is otherwise sure of itself.
Wilson is the right actor for this. He plays Gil as a man who is pleasant and a little lost, and he never oversells the wonder of what is happening to him. That restraint keeps the 1920s from turning into a costume party.
Cotillard is the other anchor. Adriana could have been a fantasy figure with no interior life, and instead she gets the film’s sharpest line about wanting the past. She is the proof that Gil’s escape is not an escape at all.
Midnight in Paris is not Allen’s heaviest film and does not try to be. It is 94 minutes of fantasy, comedy and romance, and it works because it knows exactly what it is arguing. The 1920s are a good place to visit. The film is smart enough to say so, and smart enough to send Gil home.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
