It seems to be the summer of nostalgia. While largely a religious allegory, The Tree of Life is undeniably nostalgic for 1950s and 60s Texas. While largely a Spielberg homage, Super 8 is a film that pines for small town living in the late 70s. Every sequel and superhero film that comes out is released with some degree of nostalgia for fans. Woody Allen’s latest film, Midnight in Paris, is a great addition to a summer that prefers to look back instead of looking forward. It shows love for the written word and music of a time period that is closing in on being a century old. It also marks a return to form for Allen, whose output over the past several years has been inconsistent at best. It actually feels like the man is having fun once again instead of rehash in hoary noir conventions and searching for his next Annie Hall.
Owen Wilson plays Gil, a screenwriter who by his own definition is a “Hollywood hack,” who finds himself on vacation in Paris with his fiance (Rachel McAdams) while trying to overcome crippling writers block as he attempts to write his first ever novel. Gil seems far more enamoured with the city than his fiance and her parents (the wonderful Kurt Fuller as a Tea Party Republican and Mimi Kennedy) who treat the city as both a status symbol and a bore to bein. During his many late night walks in the city, Gil is picked up by a mysterious car every night at midnight that transports hims back to the Paris of the 1920s. These mysterious trips back in time put him into contact with such literary and artistic luminaries as F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Thor‘s Tom Hiddleston and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World’s Allison Pill), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody), and a really difficult Ernest Hemmingway (Corey Stoll). Here he also meets a young woman named Adriana (Marion Cotillard) that he becomes taken with who wishes she had lived in a different era herself.
Allen seems engaged by his work here, and much like the (somewhat unjustly) lauded series of films he made in London, he seems to have found a new location to exploit. The time travel aspect of this film has shades of his previous work in The Purple Rose of Cairo, but without any of the melodramatics of that project. Wilson, playing the Allen surrogate that appears in all of his films, has never been better, and adds a soulful sadness to all of his lines. The supporting cast is all aces, with everyone on top of their game, particularly Stoll who steals every scene he is in. Allen occasionally lapses into the kind of pseudo intellectualism that he is constantly railing against, but without those indulgences, it wouldn’t really be a Woody Allen film. It helps that despite the high minded literary aspect of the film, that the jokes are actually funny. Midnight in Paris is easily Allen’s biggest crowd pleaser in years.
Rating: 
Rated PG
Cast: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams
Directed by: Woody Allen
Top image: A scene from Midnight in Paris. Courtesy Mongrel Media.
