Midnight in Paris - 2011 - 3 Stars

Cast: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates, Marion Cotillard, Michael Sheen, Michael Fassbender

Director: Woody Allen

Midnight in Paris, the latest Woody Allen film, is about a Hollywood-screenwriter and Allen-surrogate played by Owen Wilson who has grand literary ambitions, but can't put them on paper. Wilson does a nice job of making the Allen-surrogate his own and provides his own unique gentile charm that is nice change of pace from the typical Woody characters. Like all late period Allen-surrogates Wilson has a gorgeous, shrew of a fiance, played by Rachel McAdams. McAdams is such a warm screen presence that she almost makes the character undetestable, but falls just short. Wilson travels around contemporary Paris with a rotating cast of his fiance, her parents and a pompous intellectual played perfectly by Michael Sheen. While some of the performances make this section of the film affable, the dialogue is very heavy handed, especially in a painful scene where Wilson brings up his father-in-law's support of the Tea Party.

One night while walking around Paris the clock strikes midnight and Wilson is transported into the 1920s where he is free to hobnob with Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Luis Bunuel among others. Allen wisely avoids trying to explain any of the logistics behind the conceit; the film is a fantasy and creating strict rules would weigh down the film. If the fantasy above is one you have had before, you will love this movie, if not, you will still be mildly entertained. Once Wilson arrives in Paris, there are few surprises, he meets his heroes, gets to make 85 jokes where the punchline is predicated in historical irony and lives out the fantasy of being in "a golden era". The movie's climax is a "minor insight", so anyone expecting more than a trifle will be disappointed.

There is a scene in American Masters: Woody Allen where we see Woody rummaging through loose sheets of yellow legal pad on his bed, each piece of paper has a comedic premise like, "A man inherits all the magic tricks of a great magician". One quickly realizes that even a prolific worker like Woody will generate a lot more premises than actual movies. Woody ends this scene by saying "I'll spend an hour thinking of that and it'll go no place and i'll go onto the next one." Midnight in Paris is a charming daydream, but a minor movie; maybe Woody should have grabbed the next piece of paper from the pile.