One of my friends likes to say, when he’s particularly enamored with a play or a movie, “I want to live in that.” What I love about Midnight in Paris is that in telling the story of a man who desperately wants to lose himself in another time and place, it gives us a world we want to lose ourselves in as well.
Owen Wilson plays affable writer Gill, who travels to the City of Lights with his shrill harpy fiancee (Rachel McAdams) and her stodgy parents. While everyone else complains about the rich food and the confusing streets, Gill falls in love with Paris and starts fantasizing about staying there instead of going back to his screenwriterly life in LA. But it turns out the boundary between past and present is more permeable than anyone imagined when an antique Bentley pulls up alongside him at the stroke of midnight and offers him a ride back to the Paris of the Roaring Twenties. This is the sort of movie that rewards you for having paid attention in your college lit classes (and I’m assuming you all did) — I won’t spoil any of the jokes because the surprise is half the fun, but I will tell you that my favorite one almost slides under the radar during a party scene, and it made me glad I audited that Women in Literature class senior year.
Everyone’s falling over themselves to praise this little gem, and deservedly so — it’s completely charming without ever resorting to cuteness, and I loved that. Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard are both cast so expertly that neither one seems to be acting at all. Corey Stoll as Hemingway gets some of the best dialogue in the movie and he doesn’t waste a single word — his intensity is somehow funny and melancholy at the same time. I actually think Rachel McAdams does an admirable job reaching back into her Mean Girls reserves and pulling out the cattiest, brattiest bitch she can summon up, but I wish she hadn’t been given such a thankless role. At no point in the movie is there even a hint of whatever spark initially drew these characters together — she’s never even nice to him, for god’s sake. Not that I haven’t seen couples in real life treat each other this way, but I think the movie would’ve been more poignant if she had a single redeeming quality that might make Gill conflicted about whether or not to stay in Paris without her.
Is it weird for me to call this a romantic movie you should see alone? At any rate, I was glad I could lose myself in it without distractions. Oh, who am I kidding — go see it with your loved one and be glad their parents have never shown up at your hotel door in their bathrobes.
