The Subject Was Movies: Midnight in Paris
I am an Old School Woody Allen fan from before his unveiling as a creepy Old Man.
The best Woody Allen movies are:
- Take the Money and Run --- A documentary spoof of an inept bank robber (Mr. Allen wrote the script and stars), Louise Lasser is an absolute comic delight as a witness to a robbery where she can't even remember or identify the culprit, because Mr. Allen's character is so unremarkable. The Robber's criminal failures provide a downward spiral into a normal and conventional life.
- Bananas --- Political Insanity that is only now rivaled by the Republican Party and its Quest for the Presidency and the Downfall of the American Nation. Again, the crazed power plays and lies become so wild and outrageous that they result in normalcy which is a common theme of the early Woody Allen movies. It is as if Stalin had machiavellied his way into becoming the Queen of England and the only people that he could kill or torture were his own family (and he did have some practice at that in the Soviet Union). He might be Queen but he can't just starve the Scots to death without the consent of parliament and the Scots.
- Annie Hall --- Diane Keaton was never so charming and unmannered than in this movie. She has become a clone of Katherine Hepburn with her comic tics now. Manhattan was so exciting in its 1979 decay.
- Hannah and Her Sisters --- Diane Wiest was another charmer. Mr. Allen did like his leading ladies and he let them shine. The only problem was that he was still casting himself in the romantic leading man role and his own acting tics and age made him another clone of Katherine Hepburn in Her After the Fifties movies. Manhattan was shiny and sunny in its resurrection, I wanted to live there and scamper about in Central Park like a squirrel.
I haven't kept up with the recent movies. Everyone sounds and acts just like the old (but he was young then) Woody Allen of the older and much better written movies. It is the same old schtick but now made unpleasant by sexual deviancy. It is as if Abbot and Costello were actually talking about Taking Sexual Advantages in their "Who's on First?" classic routine.
But I heard about Midnight in Paris and decided to give it a try. I love the 1920s in Europe and America. And Paris? Not even Sex and the City could ruin Paris for me.
First of all, Mr. Allen does not appear in the movie so I don't have to think about him and his disquieting sexual mores. His surrogate is Owen Wilson who has some of Mr. Allen's mannerisms and vocal habits but without the accompanying pederasty when in the company of a younger and comely woman. Mr. Wilson is also charming and can play eager naïveté which is rather surprising because in most of his movies he uses the charm as a coercive tactic to achieve a dubious end. That broken nose of his saves him from being a latter day Troy Donahue --- all pretty insincerity.
The movie opens with shots of Paris in the present day, but the buildings and streets in the shots are Paris of the Past, or Paris in all its Pasts. There are medieval bridges over the Seine and the square where the Madame Guillotine beat the Time for the Dance of the Terror and the Louvre where another Lady, Mona Lisa, sedately reigns and Napoleon's Arc de Triomphe and all the layers of Past Parises. Paris is an archaeological dig.
Mr. Wilson's character is a writer vacationing in Paris and worrying over his first novel (he is a screenwriter) accompanied by his fiancėe and her parents. Like me, Mr. Wilson's character, Gil, is an admirer of Paris in the 1920s when it was a magnet and a cozy breeding nest for literary and artistic Americans. Gil's novel is about a man who runs a memorabilia shop. Gil wants the comfort and the stability and the unchanging knowledge of the past to give him security in his uncertain present and future. Every one in Paris wants those layers of the Past to comfort them, from a pedantic Michael Sheen who is full of half accurate stories about Paris' Pasts to a Nostalgia Shop Girl.
Lost one night in Paris, while walking the streets like Charles Dickens, the clock strikes midnight and like a Dickens' fairy tale, Gil enters an old 1920 Peugeot Touring Car and finds himself in 1920s Paris with Picasso and Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, and the Fitzgeralds and Bricktop. Gil is Cinderella who after toiling on his novel among his evil in-laws can go to the Roaring 1920s ball with all his Literary princes and princesses.
Corey Stoll plays "a fine Ernest Hemingway, a brave Ernest Hemingway" and Kathy Bates defines Gertrude Stein beautifully. She has a cute French accent. Adrien Brody, with his pronounced nose, plays Salvador Dali who has an intense conversation in a cafė with Owen Wilson, with his pronounced nose, as Gil about Rhinoceroses.
Rhinos have prominent noses. I laughed out loud.
Gil falls for Picasso's and Hemingway's girlfriend who thinks that the best time in Paris was La Belle Époque. And when a horse drawn carriage takes them one midnight in Paris to that century, Gil and the girlfriend part ways just as he later parts ways with his fiancée and the in-laws in Present day Paris. Love can be an over-riding sexual attraction and yearning, but the lasting relationships are built on mutual interests and respect. That is an Allen theme that doesn't apply to his real life.
Cinderella doesn't stay at the ball, she has to go home and make a life for herself. But she can live in Paris if she wishes.