Midnight in Paris movie review (2011)

Woody Allen must have had a great time writing this screenplay. Gil is of course the Woody character (there's almost always one in an Allen film), and his fantasy is an enchanted wish-fulfillment. My favorite of all the movie's time-lapse conversations may be the one Gil has with Bunuel. He gives him an idea for a film: A group of guests sit down to dinner and after the meal is over, they mysteriously find themselves unable to leave the house. "But why not?" Bunuel asks. "They just can't," Gil explains. Bunuel says it doesn't make any sense to him. If the story idea and perhaps the name Bunuel don't ring a bell, that's a scene that won't connect with you, but Allen seems aware that he's flirting with inside baseball, and tries to make the movie charming even for someone who was texting all during high school.

Owen Wilson is a key to the movie's appeal. He makes Gil so sincere, so enthusiastic, about his hero worship of the giants of the 1920s. He can't believe he's meeting these people, and they are so nice to him — although at the time, of course, they didn't yet think of themselves as legends; they ran into ambitious young writers like Gil night after night in Miss Stein's salon.

Another treasure in the film is Kathy Bates' performance. She is much as I would imagine Gertrude Stein: an American, practical, no-nonsense, possessed with a nose for talent, kind, patient. She's something like the Stein evoked by Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, his memoir of this period. She embodies the authority that made her an icon.

Then there's Adriana (Marion Cotillard), who has already been the mistress of Braque and Modigliani, and is now Picasso's lover, and may soon — be still, my heart! — fall in love with Gil. Compared to her previous lovers, he embodies a winsome humility, as well he might. Meanwhile, life in the present continues, with Gil's bride-to-be and future in-laws increasingly annoyed by his disappearances every night. And there's another story involving a journey even further into the past, indicating that nostalgia can change its ingredients at a movable feast.

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