Movie Review: Midnight In Paris

We all are subject to our daydreams, be they becoming our own boss, winning the lotto, or quitting our job to spend the year backpacking through Europe.  Daydreams help us weave our way through the realities of life, dreaming of places we wish we could see, bygone eras that we wish to magically be transported to. They also seem to go hand and hand with nostalgia, with many of our daydreams revolving around the past.

For those of you who often find yourself lost in the past, longing for a time travel machine to recapture a time that we only know through history books, Woody Allen’s latest film, Midnight in Paris, is a must see.

The romantic comedy unfolds with a young couple, played by Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams, visiting the City of Lights on a family vacation. Wilson’s character, Gill Pender, is a hopeless romantic and a writer, who finds his creativity being stifled by writing boring Hollywood scripts.

Gil is preoccupied by the bygone era of Paris in the 1920’s—a time abundant with writers and artists producing some of the greatest works of our time. Gil is trying to perfect his first novel, but finds himself struggling for inspiration. His fiancée, Inez, played by Rachel McAdams, is a superficial, self absorbed woman capable of being no one’s inspiration. 

As Gil strolls through the streets of Paris alone at midnight, searching for inspiration, he suddenly finds himself caught in a “ripple in time,” which allows him to travel back in time to Paris in the 1920’s. He soon finds himself in the company of literary legends such as F.Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, and Gertrude Stein, along with renowned artists such as Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. He also finds himself falling for a charming “artist’s muse” played by the alluring French actress Marion Cotillard. Throughout his adventure in the past, Gil tries to reconcile what the past provides for him that the present cannot.

Witty dialogue and a stunning back drop make the movie easy to watch. Writers and literary loves will delight in the interactions with Fitzgerald and Hemmingway, played by Tom Hiddleston and Corey Stoll. Kathy Bates appears as a motherly and likable Gertrude Stein, and Adrian Brody delights as Salvador Dali, the undeniably genius and over-the-top surrealist painter.  

As the movie unfolds on the screen, those watching can’t help but be drawn into the perplexing mental crisis that Gil is faced with. The movie taps into the eternal human condition of constantly wanting to be somewhere else, or trying so hard to recapture the past even when we know it is a lost cause.  As the movie teaches us, one person’s “golden age” is always another person’s mundane “present.”

Midnight in Paris is a perfect escapist fairytale for adults; a wistful and romantic ride that leaves us pondering whether the grass was greener, or if that question is just subject to our own romantic ideas of what the “golden age” was for us.

Midnight in Paris is currently playing at Clearview Cinemas, White St.