“Midnight in Paris” (2011)

It is pleasing to report that at age 75, with his new movie “Midnight in Paris”, Woody Allen has enjoyed the biggest commercial success of his 46 year, 46 six film career.  The cliche ‘return to form’ has been grossly overused with regard Allen in the time since his acrimonious break-up with one-time partner, collaborator and now mother-in-law Mia Farrow.  Inconsistency has plagued his work from the early 1990s on, with Allen often disappointing his loyal fan-base with one or more duds before bouncing back with an unexpected hit.  In the last five years alone he’s gone from the triumph of “Match Point” to the retrograde “Scoop” and just-plain-awful “Cassandra’s Dream”, hit the highs again with the sexy “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” and the uproarious “Whatever Works” before again bombing with  “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger”.  Now comes “Midnight in Paris”, a wee gem if far from Allen’s very best.

As with most of his recent, European shot films, the story is very much one of Americans abroad.  The fish-out-of-water scenario no doubt reflects some of Allen’s own unease at being displaced from his longtime home and artistic base, New York.  One of the reasons “Midnight in Paris” works so well though is that it is more about the mythic French capital than the actual place.  It’s about how North Americans romanticise the city out of all proportion, about Paris’ symbolic function in US cultural history.

Both  plot and theme are straightforward.  Owen Wilson plays Gil, a typical Allen protagonist, an aspiring serious writer who has too long prostituted his talents in Hollywood.  Looking for inspiration in the city that influenced so many of his artistic heroes - Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and so on - Gil is burdened by catty fiance Inez - an underused Rachel McAdams - and her philistine parents.  Turning away from both them and Inez’s  insufferably pretentious, pseudo intellectual friend Paul - a spot-on Michael Sheen - Gil explores Paris alone.

What he finds involves fantastic time displacement.  I will refrain from giving detail as a large part of the film’s pleasure is discovering the conceit first hand.  Suffice it to say Allen has always been adept at recreations of earlier eras and his skills don’t let him down in “Midnight in Paris”.  If some of the famous characters Gil befriends are little more than caricatures at least they are wittily and knowingly written ones.  A sprinkling of  stars both American and French have enormous fun delivering Allen dialogue whose only weakness is a certain in-joke humour.  If you aren’t sufficiently versed on pre-war writers, painters and filmmakers some things may well fail to register.

In his best work Allen’s ideas have a good deal more complexity and emotional resonance than seen in “Midnight in Paris”.  As a romance the film falls flat, with Wilson barely credible as an attractive leading man and no discernible chemistry with either McAdams or Marion Cotillard.  As comedy, however, there can be no arguing with pointed one-liners and surprisingly topical political asides.  Allen’s warning about the dangers of idealising the past is imaginatively and playfully put across.  In encouraging his audience to revel in long gone eras he effectively lets us have our cake and eat it too, demonstrating perhaps that no one is more prone to buying into the grass-was-always-greener-then myth than the writer-director director himself.