PG-13, 1 hr. 34 min. Directed By:
Woody Allen. Release Date: Jun 10, 2011.
DVD Release Date: Dec 20, 2011 .
I walked
in to Midnight in Paris fully
prepared to hate it. I’ve only seen a
few of Allen's movies, but I’ve never really enjoyed any of them with the exception
of Scoop, which will probably not be
hailed as his finest work. What I’ve
seen of his work rubs me as pretentious and a bit high-reaching for the subject
matter. In my head, Mr. Allen has
frequently found himself in the position that George Clooney currently
enjoys: he could drop a polished turd in
our laps and we’d love it simply because he made it. There were added problems for me caused by
casting. I’ve come to hate Owen
Wilson. He has the occasional movie
where I’ve enjoyed both the movie and his performance, but, by and large, I
find him a bit obnoxious, and 90% of each his characters are identical, even
when they shouldn’t be, which suggests he’s not becoming his roles, they’re
becoming him. Going in, it didn’t look
good.
So
imagine my surprise when, about fifteen minutes in to the movie, I was
hooked. Having spent time in Paris
myself, I recognized a good many of the places we watch Wilson and his crew
walk around. Also like Wilson, I
realized early on in my own stay that the magic of Paris is not in the present
(although there is this… exotic nature of the city itself if you’re American),
but in its past. One of my favorite
places in the city is the Pere Lachaise cemetery, in which at least one of the
artistic presences we see in the film are interred. Wandering through those rows of headstones,
which bear the names of famous authors, playwrights, painters, and until a few
years ago, Jim Morrison, you get a quiet sense for the sheer amount of talent
that has flocked to Paris over the years.
The film highlights that, and provides a visual accompaniment to that “if
you could have any 5 people over for dinner, living or dead, who would they be?” In a way, the movie is an attempt to
personalize these artistic giants, although much of what we see would be more
hearsay and “literary fact” rather than who these people really were.
The
supporting cast of characters was outstanding.
Marion Cotillard and Kathy Bates both stood out in that crowd, although
I liked every single member of the cast playing one of the “artiste”
crowd. In an unusual occurrence, I hated
Rachel McAdams; not her performance, but her character. It’s one of the first times I’ve seen her
play such a ridiculously nasty character since her Regina George performance in
Mean Girls, and it’s not a look I
like on her. And, to be honest, I didn’t
hate Owen Wilson. Well, I hated the Owen
Wilson parts of his character, but I dug what he did that was more Gil and less
Owen.
This
really was a movie worth seeing, and I’m glad I chose to bump this way up to
the front of my queue, even if I did so only because I thought it was going to
be on Netflix’s VERY LONG WAIT list for all eternity.
