Review of Midnight in Paris

Like a fine French cognac, Director Woody Allen improves with age, and as a writer, he is the logical person to produce such a discerning work of art as Midnight in Paris . . . a look at several great ages of art and writing, in which the luminaries of each era muse about the meaningless and emptiness of life, and how they long for some preceding Golden Age, when things were perceived to be better, but, in fact, these are the very people we look back upon as the giants of their age . . . Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Cole Porter, Dali and T.S. Eliot . . . and further back to Degas, Gaugin and Lautrec.

Woody Allen wrote this brilliant screenplay, and it is apparent that he saw himself as Gil, visiting Paris in 2010, who takes this journey back, through the portals of time, each midnight at a certain locale, to converse first-hand with the likes of Hemingway, Picasso and others.

But Allen remains behind the camera, and instead, uses a surrogate of himself in the form of Owen Wilson, another naïve and unassuming, unlikely leading man, to use this opportunity to present this very screenplay to Gertrude Stein, in her Paris apartment in the 1920s, for her critique, a task she accepts, and upon reading it, offers her advice, which fine-tunes this story even more adroitly to affect the present day. All writers should find this motion picture to be deeply satisfying, and you'll wish you could remember many of the lines in the dialogue just for their sheer wisdom.

Hemingway appears in his raw form, the gifted young writer who had just arrived at the threshold of changing the course of American literature with his new, distinctive style, borne of love and war. Picasso is the young seminal painter, whose half-wild black button eyes penetrate the moment, and in them you can see many of his paintings yet to come. It's startling !

And, Adrian Brody comes absolutely alive to give one of the best, if not the briefest performance of his career, perfect as the flamboyant Dali, when his surrealism was fresh and pure, before he became an overwrought caricature of himself.

But make no mistake, even though he is never seen, it is Woody Allen who is the main character of Midnight in Paris, in this genuinely luminous cinematic vehicle of his own creation.

It is said that Paris is for lovers. To that, I would add Midnight in Paris is for writers, with whom this movie should resonate deeply. And it is also for readers . . . and all creative persons, and anyone looking for sweet relief from Harry Potter, X Men, Transformers and The Green Lantern.

-- Thomas Ormsby

See my other reviews.