Film Review - Midnight in Paris

Thank God for Woody Allen. In the midst of an almost unbearable summer full of 3D superhero garbage and brainless sequels, he has given us his latest film Midnight in Paris only seven months after the release of his last film, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger. The middling critical reception to You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger bewildered me – of that film, I wrote: “Allen’s characters face existential dread, find comfort in ridiculous paranormal spiritualism, destroy their relationships with one another and learn the hard way that, in terms of romantic relationships, the grass will always be greener on the other side.” Powerful stuff, but for some reason, American critics weren’t impressed. Perhaps it’s because Allen offers us, on average, one movie per year, and aside from Match Point (2005) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), most of them aren’t nearly as good as his masterworks from the 1970s and 1980s.

Well, so what? A middling Woody Allen film is better than ninety-nine percent of everything else out in current release. Not that I would consider You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger a middling film in the least, mind you.

Fortunately, there’s no getting around the fact that Midnight in Paris is the funniest and most endearing movie you’ll see this year – critics and audiences alike are recognizing the film as Woody Allen’s finest work in years. Owen Wilson gives one of his best performances as Gil (the ‘Woody’ character), an American writer visiting Paris with his fiancé (Rachel McAdams) and her unbearably uppity parents (Allen’s depiction of McAdams’ conservative family would seem harsh if it wasn’t so, I don’t know, spot-on).

Gil, bored with his status as a hack Hollywood screenwriter, yearns for the Paris of the 1920s, when F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso walked the streets and tossed ideas around in cafes. And so it happens that, while Gil is walking alone through the city after midnight, Paris magically morphs into that era, and Gil quite literally hangs out with the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway and the rest of the gang. Along the way, he falls in love with Picasso’s mistress Adriana, played by Marion Cotillard, who perfectly embodies all of the beauty of Paris in any era.

The joy of this film is discovering all of this for yourself, and so I’ll refrain from saying anything else, except that Allen’s work with the Surrealists (including Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali) is brilliantly absurd. With the playful and fantastical premise, Allen is free to wrestle with large ideas in a very funny manner (not dissimilar to his work in 1985’s wonderful The Purple Rose of Cairo).

Along the way, Allen takes playful jabs at the current state of Hollywood screenwriting, Tea Party dimwits, and pseudo-intellectuals alike (Michael Sheen is perfect as that guy – you’ll know the character once you see him). This is a film that assumes you’ll catch the joke about Luis Bunuel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), or the jokes about Hemingway’s speech pattern (he talks the way he writes). Allen doesn’t bother explaining them to you because he’s not interested in pandering to the lowest common denominator, and in today’s cinema of digestible fluff for the masses, that’s quite an achievement.

More importantly, it’s a wonderful movie about nostalgia, a force so strong and bittersweet that Allen has devoted an entire film to the subject. Gradually, our protagonist learns that all people feel disillusioned with their own time and place, and secretly yearn to live in the idealized past, no matter the current era. It’s Gil’s (and Allen’s) own discovery of this truth that lends Midnight in Paris its poignant insight.

For this particular Woody Allen fan who holds Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) close to my heart, I mean it when I say that Midnight in Paris is as wonderfully poetic, sad, touching and funny as anything Woody Allen has ever made.

Wild Strawberries and Woody Allen

"You know so much, and you don't know anything."

In a haunting dream, seventy-eight year-old Dr. Isak Borg (Victor Sjostrom) is confronted with this piece of wisdom by a lost love, as his daughter-in-law, Marianne (Ingrid Thulin), drives him to a ceremony where he is being presented with an honorary award in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957), one of the most moving films I have ever seen.

How fitting that I first took in a viewing of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972, Luis Bunuel), a social satire which engaged me on a purely intellectual level, only to follow it with Wild Strawberries, a film that caught me off-guard, and floored me completely - my emotional response to the movie was something I surely hadn't suspected.

Bergman's film takes a close look at Borg, a proudly intellectual professor of science who is described by everyone, including his son and daughter-in-law, as cold and void of any emotional attachment. He decides to take a reflective drive from Stockholm, Sweden to Lund University, where he will be receiving his honorary award. Accompanied by Marianne and a trio of happy-go-lucky youngsters headed to Italy, his journey becomes a painful examination of his past, and in his reflective dreams we see how his intellectual superiority spared him from real, meaningful relationships with other human beings.

"He's on such a terribly high level, and I feel so worthless," says Sara, a cousin who Borg almost marries before she opts to marry his brother, Sigfrid, instead. Borg has no interest in taking joy out of the small things in life, such as eating from a patch of wild strawberries near the backwoods of his childhood home, and Sigfrid is the perfect alternative - a lewd man's man.

Borg's punishment - for knowing all of the answers, for understanding other human beings more than they understand themselves, for constantly engaging in intellectual activities and tossing aside simple pleasures - is loneliness. His wife is dead, his son despises him, and his very elderly mother seems even colder than Borg himself. As the professor arrives at the end of his life, he is disillusioned and haunted by his empty past. Yes, he is being awarded for his intellectual achievements, but where is the love? His son, Evald, has grown into an even colder version of his father, and the happy-go-lucky trio, who at first appear mildly annoying, ultimately represent the sort of joyous carelessness that Borg secretly envies.

In short, Wild Strawberries is an examination of that special breed of men who are so obsessed with their own intellectual abilities that they often defer from social situations, preferring to be alone with themselves and bask in their own brilliance. And, eventually, that is exactly where they are at the end of their lives - alone, with themselves.

Borg finds redemption in the finale of Wild Strawberries. "If I have been feeling worried or sad during the day, I have a habit of recalling scenes from childhood to calm me. So it was this evening," says Borg as he shuts his weary eyes. We are treated to his own portion of nostalgia, a topic I explored in some detail in last evening's post.

The film left such an impression on me because the internal struggle between the intellectual self and the emotional self is a topic that I have been writing about for a long time - in fact, due to my incredible reaction to Wild Strawberries, I will soon post a series of articles I have written in recent years about loneliness, alienation, and the struggle mentioned above. How does one resist conformation and promote individuality and yet keep away from total alienation and loneliness? Borg only began asking this question in the final chapters of his long, cold life; hopefully, by exploring the issue now, I can spare myself a cold future.

By the way, it's no wonder Woody Allen gets his inspiration from Ingmar Bergman. His films are, more or less, comedic explorations of Bergman's fascinating thematic ideas. Tomorrow night I am going to see Allen's Annie Hall (1977), one of my all-time favorite films, at the legendary Paramount Theatre downtown, as part of their 2009 Summer Film Series.

I've seen many classic movies at the Paramount, including incredible 70 MM prints of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962, David Lean), as well as The Godfather (1972, Francis Ford Coppola), The 400 Blows (1959, Francois Truffaut), Die Hard (1988, John McTiernan), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988, Martin Scorsese) and Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961, Blake Edwards). Needless to say, it is one of the finest theaters in Central Texas, and offers rich cinematic experiences of classic films during the summer.