In what might be his best film since 1997’s Sweet and Lowdown, Woody Allen sheds the jittery paranoia, forced love affair, and overly-convoluted script that were staples in the 90’s by giving us Midnight in Paris, an exploration of our relationship with and admiration of nostalgia. In present-day Paris, our protagonist Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is on vacation with his insufferably antagonizing fiancé Inez (Rachel McAdams).
This is the first time the two have been on screen since Wedding Crashers, and while that film caught the chemistry between the two, Midnight in Paris keeps such interactions sentimenal interactions on opposite sides of the same iron-girded, barbed-wire-caparisoned wall. But, this is appropriate because, as characters, they couldn’t be worlds apart. So, while a number of films force a plot-compelling love connection, this one does not; rather, the conversations between Inez and Gil are uncomfortable and seem to happen simultaneously as if they were trying to finish each other’s sentences, albeit about different topics. Essentially, the dialog in this film is not meant to connect, but to show the emotional absence between two people despite their physical presence.
Their daily lives are not perfunctory because of their financial ability to jetset and explore, but they seem to exist to move them both closer to the wedding day, which eliminates their cognizance of the present, making every movement and function a step toward the future, one that provides expected security for Inez and stagnancy for Gil. As a writer, Gil regrets cultivating a rather large bank account by being a “Hollywood hack” and has thus began writing a novel about the owner of a “memory store” filled with antiquities and baubles from the past. His inspiration for the novel comes from the desire to have lived in 1920’s Paris with the slew of expatriates who wandered the streets in the rain, found love and debauchery, and penned some of their greatest works and painted their greatest canvases.
Who knew he would have the opportunity to have his wish granted?
After a night of winetasting with Inez’s parents and the obnoxiously pedantic college professor Paul, Gil stumbles drunkenly through the streets of Paris while Inez, Paul (Michael Sheen) and his wife Carol (Nina Arianda) go dancing. As he collects his thoughts on a side street, an early-twentieth century motorcar pulls up, and a rambunctious fellow yells for Gil to join their rabble as they drive off to a brownstone illuminated with gold and filled with dancing flappers, martinis, and, oh, Cole Porter. Soon enough, Gil learns that he had been riding with F.Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who will soon introduce him to both Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, who eventually reads through Gil’s manuscript and offers him advice.
There are dozens of names dropped throughout this film, and for any art, film, or literature buff — or lowly college lecturer — it’s quite a lot of fun, but Allen doesn’t go so far as to be too literate or pedantic and make the audience feel ignorant. He certainly asks for the audience to understand and recognize certain historical benchmarks in history, but he doesn’t berate the point and mock any potential ignorance. Rather, he weaves the ironic whimsy of his narrative with the general, but seemingly ubiquitous, view that the past is always better than the present.
Modernism of the 20’s was better than the new millennium. Impressionism was better than Modernism. Romanticism had a leg up on these two, and the Renaissance trumped them all.
While this dialectic is rather reminiscent of the notion that kids today are worse or the world is more violent today than it was in the past (unless you take into account Steven Pinker’s most recent book), Allen transcends this cliché by paralleling our base knowledge of these decades with contradictory events that don’t make it to the Wikipedia page or the thirty minute History Channel segment on Rodanthe.
In other words, our knowledge is based on truncated retellings of truncated retellings, and this is exposited brilliantly in the embodiment of Paul, a man who seems to be an expert on everything and is often taken as such given the conviction with which he speaks, and this is what makes him a brilliant character. He’s certainly pedantic, but his passion creates a truth that others will not challenge for fear of ridicule. Therefore, he is a catalyst that changes history: a scholar who parlays his title into a position of historical authority, going so far as not only to question the knowledge of a Louvre guide who has been trained in French art and artistry, but to insist that she is mistaken. Certainly, this makes him a dislikable character, but Paul’s condescension also exposes a detrimental – though epidemical – view on history: that there are few variations and what he has learned is set in stone.
There’s a prime source of his adamancy found in his definition of nostalgic people who want to live in the past: “they are afraid to acknowledge the pains of the present,” and while there is, admittedly, some poignancy to this statement, he’s only half-correct because the convictions he has for his own assertions obviates any possibility that there is second element to this notion: those who want to live in the past are unwilling to acknowledge the pains of the past. Interestingly enough, placing “pains” solely in the present makes Paul a martyr for his generation and puts his existence above his predecessors, relegating them to statues of ancient eras without lives, loves, or experiences that are not recorded in and regurgitated from history books, transforming base information into “knowledge” that somehow fills in the myriad holes left in the story of the story that we’ve heard about someone famous.
And in a way, this is what Allen is doing to the audience as well. Perhaps the stories he weaves throughout about Dali’s conversations, Gauguin’s interactions with Toulouse Lautrec, and Picasso’s inspirations are true, though I am not an expert on Picasso and am rather unaware of the flings that he and Hemingway shared. But the point is that we don’t know unless we take Midnight in Paris as an interpretation and research outside of the context of the film. Or, we could become Paul, absorb the narrative, and recite it with a passion and sternness that defies contradiction.
