Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, starring Owen Wilson, 2011)

Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, 2011)
Plot and Astaroth-worthy cast list can be found here.
The 1920s do sound lovely, both because we’re starting to see modern inventions that make life recognizable and comfortable and because the artists living and working there have captured our imaginations as exciting, strange, and beautiful people.  Allen allows his protagonist, Gil Pender, himself, and his audience to romanticize and indulge in Paris of the 1920s.  He never makes us feel guilty for that, and nor does he ever cast aspersions on the time itself, despite affectionate parodies of historical figures. History and fantasy combine: the past arrives in a Cinderella stagecoach at the stroke of midnight.
P.P.S. Time from finishing film to posting: about 25 hours. Ultimate goal: an appropriate and smaller number of hours.
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PSA: Plentiful Spoils Ahead

What I liked about it:

·      *The cast feels like a Wes Anderson cast: famously whimsical and whimsically stocked with famous people

·     * The time period is perfect because I couldn’t logically imagine being happy before the 1920s, either

·     * Owen Wilson is a California Woody Allen plus a few inches and a crooked nose.  I like this connection too because of Annie Hall and Alvy's disillusionment with California

·     * Where all du French composers at? The diffusion of American music throughout the film is a reminder that just as American artists, musicians, and writers flocked to Paris (paralleled nicely by the American protagonist's pilgrimage there), American jazz was having an equally influential impact on the Parisian soundscape. It was a little sad not to see Alan Arkin do a killer Satie, or Hillary Swank as a young Virgil Thomson, but I guess the point was made.

·     * It’s the ultimate name-dropping cinematic trip, but done with love. It’s Woody Allen.  We all know he knows we know he knows who Modigliani is. He doesn’t need to do it to show off.

·     * It’s purty

·     * The opening montage ode to Paris is just as akin to a city symphony as to the opening sequence of Manhattan

·     *  Time travel movies are awesome, first of all, but especially awesome to think about when placed beside straightforward period pieces. [I'm realizing after writing the post I'm not going to be able to expand this idea much tonight, but someday I will!]

·    *  The gallery scene

·     * It’s Paris x 3 x infinity kind of

·     * It made me think about how adulterous thoughts are legitimized in fiction

·    *  There’s a deliberate ambiguity about whether or not this stuff is in his head until the very end, when it matters even less than it has throughout the whole film

Ah, the Golden Age fallacy, the belief that life was better in a previous time.  This is always a funny one for me, because there are a few things the logical part of my brain can’t get past when imagining myself at any other time before about the early twentieth century.

These include:

·      * I would not be able to see jack nor his beanstalk. My eyesight is so bad I         

           would have had to be homebound or else get picked off by eagles.

·       * I wouldn’t probably have even made it into the world, as the umbilical cord 

           was wrapped around my neck before birth.

·       * Doritos

·       * I’M A WOMAN DUH

These concerns are among the superficial reasons I really like the historic setting of the film. (The ancestor of toilet paper we know and love today was a commercial product of the nineteenth century, and nuchal cords were able to be dealt with by then as well. I would have had bottle caps for glasses, Doritos were just a gleam in the corn industry's eye, and I'd have enjoyed relatively few legal rights, but whatevs.) 

It is very interesting, though, that at the very beginning of Midnight in Paris, Michael Sheen’s character Paul, an acquaintance and intellectual (whom Gil likes to think of as a pseudo-intellectual), cautions Gil against the Golden Age fallacy. Walking through Versailles, Paul says, “Nostalgia is denial, denial of the painful present … the name for this denial is Golden-Age Thinking … it is a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.” Paul is obnoxious: he always has to throw in what he knows, likes to dance with engaged women, and ultimately has an affair with Gil’s fiancée, played by Rachel McAdams. We are conditioned to dislike him, to mistrust his words like those of the jerk in Annie Hall rhapsodizing on Marshall McLuhan for everyone to hear; yet, his caution about Golden-Age Thinking appears to be the conclusion Gil draws by the end of the movie.  Gil himself says to Adriana, his love interest from the 1920s who wants to stay in the Belle-Époque, “if you stay here, though, and this becomes your present, then pretty soon you’ll start imagining another time was really your, you know, was really the golden time.  Yeah, that’s what the present is.  It’s a little unsatisfying because life’s a little unsatisfying.” Gil then chooses to return to his present, and the ending scene, in which he walks with a beautiful young Parisian in the rain, suggests he finds a better match for him in life than either his then-ex-fiancée or Adriana.

But what are we to make of the asshole being right at the very beginning of the movie? I don’t have the answer yet since I first watched it less than twenty-four hours ago (and I’m trying really hard to post quickly after first viewing. Once school starts turnaround's gonna have to happen pronto), but I'm going to muse on it for a bit.  One possibility is, of course, that Paul is not right and they’re both wrong.  After all, Adriana stays in the Belle-Époque, and we don’t know what becomes of her. She could be very happy. At most, though, this movie seems willing to be inconclusive rather than deliberately misleading. 

We could go with some symbolism of where the characters are while being disdainful of those who romanticize the past: one of the most touristy spots near Paris. Versailles is a loaded place, a symbol of failed government even as its opulence continues to dazzle and inspire modern people. 

Another point is of course that assholery doesn’t preclude someone from saying something right that we don’t want to hear.  Even the most airborne of the windbags can have an insight once in a while, as multiple semesters in grad school and many more semesters in life have taught me well. 

Finally (for what my brain comes up with tonight, anyway), it could be that the film celebrates digression, mistakes, place, and mobility. I don’t quite think that Allen is into the tired “it’s not about the destination; it’s about the journey” message. His fondness for literal journeys that end in realization—think Alvy’s trip to California in Annie Hall, or the trips to and throughout Spain in Vicky Cristina Barcelona—equally values the epiphany and the journey that generated it.

Midnight isn’t afraid of highlighting journeys or processes.  The whole movie is predicated on Gil's visit to Paris from another location, and the metaphorical distance of history becomes a geographic distance traveled in a stagecoach.  In addition, we see the process of revision as Hemingway and Stein both review Gil’s novel, and we know he works on it between readings. We see our own process of creating history when we see Stein buy a Matisse for 500 francs.

I guess I think that Paul was right, but he didn’t voice the whole point, because he didn’t understand or care about Gil’s situation. The asshole got to say something almost right, but he's not the protagonist, so it was incomplete. Gil was fantasizing about choosing his time because he was dissatisfied with his present, yes, but he was dissatisfied with his present because he felt as if he had no control over his place, both in his relationship with Inez and geographically in America. This lack of placement control also meant an inability to steer his future. While he could not stay on his trip—the spatial metaphor we usually use is “back”—to history, it demonstrated to him that he was perfectly free to stay on his trip “over” to Paris, which meant that he was free to take whatever trip he wanted "forward" into the future. Time and place become intertwined in the film just as they do in individual and collective lives, which is what makes the prospect of time travel so cool.  In many time travel stories (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Dr. Who, A Wrinkle in Time, Time Bandits, hey, even Men in Black III) characters are transported not just through time but also space. 

I'm not about to get into any scientific relationships between time and space, because that's not my bag, but it is interesting to note that when place isn't warped along with time, it becomes a big deal.  In Groundhog Day, Phil Connors is doomed to repeat not only his date, but also his location.  One imagines he would have become far less bored, and also far less motivated to be a decent human being, if his time travel came without the constrictions of place. 

 Throughout Midnight in Paris we have no conclusive evidence of Gil being delusional or sane, and it really doesn't matter. His journey through controlled and uncontrollable circumstances is his own, just as our lives are our own.  I like, though, that the point isn't "is he crazy? is it in his head? is it real?" though I enjoy that ambiguity in other films (A Very Long Engagement being perhaps my favorite until I remember what my actual favorite example is). The analogy I'm feeling right now to this uncertainty about reality versus fantasy is to our uncertainty about what kind of knowledge we have and how useful it is. 

The best demonstration of this latter idea occurs during the scene in an art gallery, in which Gil disagrees with Paul about Picasso’s “Adriana.” (The link shows you both the earlier scene at Stein's as well as the gallery scene.) Paul spouts off knowledgeable facts about "Adriana," but as we have just visited that painting in the 1920s with Gil, we know that his knowledge about it differs from Paul’s.  Gil begins to tell what he knows from firsthand knowledge. Everyone looks at him in disgust both because they assume he knows nothing and because of what he says he knows, specifically, information that isn’t useful or aligned with the historical narrative built around the painting. I’m not always great at knowing the thing that everyone in the room wants to think or talk about, or what the most important thing to know about a subject is. What I know is just kind of this amalgam of things that have stuck for one reason or another, be it emotional attachment, repetition, diligence, sensory memory, embarrassment at not knowing it at one point in time, accident, or chance. While I don't need to empathize with a character to like a movie, I definitely allied myself with Gil at that moment, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

 Midnight in Paris was my favorite Allen film of late.  I give it seven drawers and a key.

Say "hello" to Trotsky,

Kate

P.S. I'd really like to develop methodologies for analyzing period pieces, so if anyone has thoughts on this subject, I'd really love to hear them! Thank you for reading.