Midnight in Paris is, again, a movie I'd been interested to see when it first came out. I was curious in a mild sort of way - it looked good, it seemed funny, there were lots of good people in it, etc., but in the way these things sometimes go, the chance to see it passed me by, until...Best PictureQuest 2012.
So Gil (Owen Wilson) and his fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams) are in Paris. Gil is a screen writer, working on his first novel, and Inez just seems to be the daughter of snotty rich people. She doesn't appear to do much of anything except whine and wear pretty clothes. They meet up with some of Inez's friends, the pedantic Paul (a very disguised Michael Sheen) and his wife? Girlfriend? and what started out as a romantic getaway before their wedding turns out to be dominated by Paul, a droning intellectual. Poor Gil just doesn't seem to fit - he doesn't get along with his future in-laws (daddy is a Tea Party Republican on top of it), and he doesn't get a long with wind bag, know-it-all Paul, who argues with a docent on a Rodin tour. Yeah, he's one of those. All Gil really wants to do is let Paris inspire him. Oh, yeah, and he wants to walk around in the rain.
Is it any wonder that Gil longs for the nostalgia and simplicity of an earlier time? He longs for 1920s Paris, and one night, following a wine tasting, he gets lost on the streets of Paris and is picked up by a carful of noisy Parisians. He gets swept along - into the past. Glorious Paris of the 1920s, into the world of Cole Porter, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Pablo Picasso. He goes to a party there, spends some time chilling with the Fitzgeralds, and Hemingway agrees to show his novel to Stein, and then Gil wakes up back in 2010.
Why he doesn't think that this is all a crazy kind of dream, I don't know, but he is determined to share this glittering world with Inez. He drags her back to the place where the car picked him up and.... nothing happens. She thinks he's nuts, with a possible brain tumor, and gets a cab back to their hotel. He hangs around, and at the stroke of midnight, the car comes back, taking him back to the 1920s. He meets Picasso's mistress, played gorgeously by Marion Cotillard (in beautiful, beautiful 1920s flapper style dresses) and kind of falls for her. It turns out that she is longing for the simpler, more glorious era of France in the Belle Epoch. He figures out, after a while, that everyone thinks their own time sucks and wants to be in what they perceive as a golden age. But is anyone happier about it? No. Stein and Hemingway have read his book, which he seems to be basing on his real life, because Hemingway wonders why the protagonist has not figured out why the fiancee is having an affair with her pedantic friends. The light goes on, Gil confronts Inez about it. They split up, Gil goes walking and meets up with a shop keeper he's been chatting with - a Cole Porter-phile named Gabrielle, who also likes to walk in the rain, and they walk off together, hand-in-hand through the rain soaked streets.
Aaaaannnd, that's it. This film was notable mainly for its gorgeous footage of Paris. It had snappy Woody Allen sounding dialogue, and was funny in the way Woody Allen movies are funny, you know? I didn't quite understand why Gil and Inez were together in the first place, because there was absolutely nothing likeable about her. Nothing. (But I still love you, Rachel).
I am also a bit lukewarm on Owen Wilson as a leading man. I think they were going for a sort of every man vibe with him, and he wandered through the film kind of baffled. It worked, I guess, but I didn't care very much about him as a character, so by the end I was kind of like, oh. Okay. Well good for you, but why didn't you dump that bitch sooner? And I know the trips to the past were the whole point of the thing, but it became a little too much, like, here's Dali (even though Adrien Brody was a hilarious high point), and here's Toulouse Loutrec, and let's cram as many references as we can into here even though it's getting kind of annoying now.
Still, it was enjoyable. Was it Oscar worthy? I don't know. What I can tell you, is that I am not a huge Francophile - and this movie made me want to go to Paris. I think there should totally also be an Oscar category for that.
I have three more films on the list to see - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (still in theaters), Tree of Life (red box) and War Horse (I fear I've missed the boat on this one). I guess we'll see how close we get to the goal by the time the broadcast comes along.
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