Don’t forget ‘Paris’

In theaters Friday: The Devil Inside

New on DVD/Blu-Ray: Contagion, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, I Don’t Know How She Does It

That Woody Allen’s latest relationship comedy Midnight in Paris is being seriously considered for an Oscar by some is proof of the lackluster year of movies we’ve just been subjected to, or survived, depending on your perspective. Even Roger Ebert took to his blog feeling the need to explain why 2011 was such saw such a recession of creative cinema.

That’s not to say Midnight in Paris is a poor film at all. It is actually breezy and enjoyable, a creative what-if romp, even, but on Allen’s own terms. Not unlike The Purple Rose of Cairo, the film’s protagonist is trapped in his fantasies and longing for a bygone era. Owen Wilson plays a Hollywood screenwriter who churns out crowd-pleasing flicks but secretly wants to be taken seriously as an author. On a trip with his fiancée and her wealthy parents to Paris, Wilson decides he needs to move to take the French capital as his muse and move there in order to unlock his creative side and indulge in his obsession with all things and all artists from the 1920s.

While his wife, played by a pragmatic Rachel McAdams, reconnects with a know-it-all professor she crushed on in college—played by a perfectly annoying Michael Sheen— Wilson begins nightly excursions into his subconscious courtesy of a mysterious vintage car that takes him time-traveling back to the roaring ‘20s at the stroke of midnight. There he meets and receives counsel from his idols F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway.

Maybe Woody Allen was inspired by 2010 blockbuster Inception? He even cast that film’s leading spectral lady Marion Cotillard as a doe-eyed free spirit who draws Wilson deeper into his fantasy. Cotillard plays the lover of Pablo Picasso and seems to eat, drink and breath only that which is creative and life-affirming and on the edge. Wilson is ready to follow her anywhere, to give up his life for this fantasy until Cotillard reveals her own desire to live in a different era, the Belle Epoque of late Victorian-era Paris, and Wilson’s crisis of identity and affection rises even further.

Midnight is talky, obviously. This is Allen after all, but the iconic director does offer a keen eye for less-than-obvious Parisian visuals to match the philosophical and political bantering throughout. Other highlights include a riotous cameo by Adrian Brody as an overly earnest and rhinocerous-obsessed Salvador Dali. Sign him up for a Dali biopic now. There’s also a really a nice visual gag with a private detective—hired by Wilson’s future father-in-law—to discover where Wilson goes every night that reminds us of Allen’s absurdist peak and provides one of the film’s few laugh-out-loud moments. Much of it rests on subtly and whimsy.

Wilson was okay in the lead, though oddly restrained, even in his amazement, even in the face of Corey Stoll’s lion-hearted Hemingway or in the arms of Cotillard’s elegantly rogueish enchantress. Fantastical things are popping off all around him, but other than displaying a bookish zeal from meeting icons like Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Allen fails as a director to transmit Wilson’s exhilaration to the audience. Sure, Allen would never be confused with Baz Lurmann or his Paris-set spectacle Moulin Rouge, but this is all just a little too deadpan.

I give Allen credit for gathering the stones to put words into the mouths of such iconic artists and thinkers, especially Hemingway, who’s monologue on fear and writing sounds like a mind-meld between the men behind A Moveable Feast and Annie Hall.

Hemingway: “I believe that love that is true and real creates a respite from death. All cowardice comes from not loving or not loving well, which is the same thing. And when the man who is brave and true looks death squarely in the face, like some rhino hunters I know, or Belmonte who is truly brave, it is because they love with sufficient passion to push death out of their minds, until it returns as it does to all men.”