This is a typical Woody Allen movie, which is to say, “a cliché is a cliché for a reason”. I enjoyed it. However, being an Allen movie means good things and bad things for the execution of certain ideas. Let’s start with the bad. The female characters are lazily sketched stereotypes, one and all. It’s like Where’s Wally for grown men. Can YOU spot the spoilt, materialistic bitch who’s ruining it all for the insecure but secretly extremely talented male protagonist? How about the self-effacing and beautiful stranger who instantly ‘sees through’ the ostensibly average facade to the secret talents of same male protagonist, without boring him with any nuanced details about her own life? (No, having one charming aspiration that links her to him does not count as a personality.) How about the glittering, tragic socialite who’s too fucked up to understand love? (1) The only female character with any authority is the only older, larger, non-flapper-dress-wearing, non-partying, lesbian woman. Interesting. (If you’re sitting there thinking ‘Of course! It’s Gertrude Stein, that’s just how she rolls!’, I beg of you to ask yourself whether you honestly think that historically, Gertrude Stein went around softly encouraging shy young men to have faith in their first novels…
The male characters – and this is, in a sense, to move on to the good things about this movie – are deftly sketched, and despite their weighty reputations the famous artists that litter Midnight In Paris don’t come off as passé. Allen clearly has a favourite in Hemingway, who gets the best lines and certainly the most laughs. Hemingway’s bravado, intellect and intensity are lampooned fondly and yet give a sense of the scope of the genius that Owen Wilson’s character is so in love with. This is a necessary device to get us to fall for the romance of the twenties and to empathise with Wilson – otherwise we might be inclined to take Rachel McAdam’s character’s view on his rose-tinted mooning and dismiss the allure of Paris entirely, especially when Dali’s mad surrealist ‘genius’ manifests mostly in his shouting “RHINOCEROUS” at everything. (If this sounds like too harsh a criticism of the ultimate comic relief of the movie, it’s not meant to. Adrien Brody is marvellous in an all-too-short cameo reminder that The Jacket was, thankfully, not the best that he could do.) Corey Stoll (Hemingway) infuses bold lines like “We fear death because we feel that we haven’t loved well enough or loved at all, which ultimately are one and the same” with enthusiasm as well as a tone that implies significance, decreasing the pretensions of such moments and allowing the audience to feel genuinely connected to these artistic ideals, even as we laugh about them. It’s a rare movie that provokes that moment of laughing and thinking simultaneously.
As ever, Allen walks a taut line between romanticism and wry cynicism, and it’s a credit to his abilities as a director that he manages to frame Paris in both the light of the glaringly obvious (it’s like any other city, and must be treated as such if one wishes to preserve one’s intellect from getting X-Factored into sentimental overdrive); and the hazy glow of the ideal (it’s a beautiful city that’s harboured geniuses for so long, walking round it is like getting lost in someone else’s dream – probably Toulouse Lautrec’s). In the end, the script falls prey to overstating the points about nostalgia, love, and genius; so much so that to state them here again feels to me like the third time I’ve heard them tonight. Point is, it could all be intentional on Allen’s part, to overstate the elements of a romantic comedy to illustrate their recurrence and to satirise those recurrent elements which seem ridiculous, such as (- SPOILER TIME -) the character of Owen Wilson and the nameless Charlotte Gainsbourg look-a-like meeting and sharing a fondness for some small but significant activity, and thus clearly being ‘meant’ to end up together. This is despite an obvious source of discontent in his last relationship apparently being due to agreeing on little things, but not on big things. (END OF SPOILER TIME! WELCOME BACK.)
The saving grace for Allen goes for Wilson’s character as well: that they seem to genuinely be in love with all the clichés they engage with. Just as Wilson differentiates himself from his rival, the deliciously pretentious art critic (played with aplomb by Michael Sheen), by sheer dint of CARING more about the artists he so seriously pontificates about, Allen deflects criticisms of lazy scriptwriting (at least in terms of the men-folk) by retaining a clear focus on love – love of art, love of places, love of people.
Footnote (1): Incidentally, my critique is of how believable these characters are (this might be rejected by ‘post-feminist’ readers) is intended to be objective not emotional. In general. Apart from in the case of Zelda, where I find the idea that, biographically speaking, Zelda is exactly as her husband wrote her (ie. crazy, responsible for making him crazy, without an autonomous self that existed separate to him and what he knew of her, without any defence or criticism of the way in which he portrayed himself in his work) generally distasteful and markedly different to the way in which other historical characters are allowed to speak for themselves.
Maria Devlin
Image:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/edmundyeo/6106128995/
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