After fifteen years of bad reviews and negative press, Woody Allen has gone to Paris to find himself. The result is Midnight in Paris, a classic Allen comedy. Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is a self-described Hollywood hack, a screenwriter who churns out mediocre scripts for monotonous studio blockbusters. He is in Paris with his finance, Inez, a conniving and manipulative woman convincingly portrayed by Rachel McAdams. After a well-oiled evening with Inez and her overbearing parents, Gil stumbles into a chauffeured antique Peugeot, and travels through time to the Jazz Age in the City of Lights.
What follows is a long inside joke. Gil encounters the archetypal Parisian luminaries, the expats whose postwar output galvanized 20th century art. Each personality is a caricature: Hemingway, bullishly drinking and speaking in austere prose; Zelda Fitzgerald, effusive and replete with zings for her genteel husband; and Gertrude Stein, paying 500 Francs for a freshly painted Matisse.
Watching Gil’s awe-struck interactions makes for childlike joy, as the most memorable aspects of the artists we’ve encountered in high school English and Art History are delectably portrayed. Allen gives the viewer exactly what he wants: Gil’s brushes with fame are too brief to have any emotional depth, and the historical characters act precisely how we’ve always envisioned them. My favorite scene involved Gil’s encounter with a table of surrealists; as he tries to reveal that he is “from the future,” Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody) blathers on about a rhinoceros. The message? The surrealists are just as wacky as we had hoped.
Gil’s satisfaction is bolstered because the Twenties are his era, the time he always dreamed of inhabiting. Inez dismisses Gil’s dreams of abandoning his artificial Malibu existence for a Parisian pied-à-terre as an infantile longing. She and her parents are comfortable in France so long as they don’t have to leave the rarified world of luxury hotels and stylish brasseries.
Yet Inez doesn’t reject Gil out of an outright distaste for creative minds and a fascination with artists. She spends much of the trip in the company of Paul Bates (Michael Sheen) an old college crush who pontificates about the artistic grandeur of France. He’s the intellectual we love to hate, a veritable encyclopedia of academic jargon and pompous proclamations about French art.
Inez is nonplussed at Gil’s desire to create, to immerse himself in the mind of the artist rather than station himself as a comfortable observer (as Paul does). In his Commencement Op-Ed in The Crimson, Assistant Professor of English Matthew Kaiser condemned our cultural emphasis on creativity and the allegiance to the notion that all artistic creation has intrinsic value. This view makes Gil’s amateur obsession with writing a novel easy to criticize, but perhaps he too is fleeing the world of half-baked creativity. He is desperately searching for meaning, which he discovers in his outlandish temporal shift to the Parisian Twenties, both a world and an epoch away from 21st century Hollywood.