Midnight in Paris (12A)

Alison Rowat's Review

At the age of 75, Woody Allen is just about old enough to recall the first great depression, so it’s perhaps fitting he should be around for the second. While others might have you deal with these times by sipping hemlock and listening to a death march, here comes Woody with a glass of comedy fizz and some Cole Porter.

Midnight in Paris, Allen’s 41st film, finds the American writer-director back on form. It’s not Annie Hall form, not Sweet and Lowdown form, but it’s sweet, zingy, and very welcome just the same. You will find much here that’s familiar, from the credits typeface and the music to the babbling hero, but Allen brings it all together again in a delightful way. How could he fail to charm when his canvas is Paris and his leading man is Owen Wilson, half man, half Golden Retriever?

He opens with a series of scenes so quintessentially Parisian they would make the French tourism board blush. “There’s no city like this in the world,” says Gil (Wilson), an American visiting the city with his fiancee and her parents. When younger, Gill dreamed of living in Paris and writing a novel. Instead, he’s earning lots of bucks as a “Hollywood hack” screenwriter and preparing to marry the all-American Inez (Rachel McAdams).

Inez’s parents are John, an admirer of the Tea Party, and Helen, an interior designer. Played by Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy, and representing a couple of the director’s favourite targets, Republicans and those who care about soft furnishings, Allen duly has some fun at their expense.

He does the same with a friend of Inez’s who also happens to be in town (Allen’s Paris is a curiously tiny place). Paul, played by Michael Sheen, is the classic Allen blowhard, the type of know-it-all crying out to be confronted by a nearby Marshall McLuhan, fresh from Annie Hall. Paul does indeed receive his comeuppance, from a wonderfully bizarre source. You may have heard this person mentioned in unflattering terms while the picture was being shot as needing more takes than a juggling elephant. All is revealed here, and it’s another pleasant surprise. Bravo madame.

Gil’s love affair with Paris is leaving his fiancee and future in-laws cold. Where he sees a city that was once home to Picasso and Hemingway, Stein and Baker, Bunuel and Dali, they see a place to shop and acquire sore feet from walking too many picturesque boulevards.

Through some monkey business involving a vintage car and a hole in the space-time continuum, Allen gives Gil a Paris visit to remember. As he does so, in-jokes are piled upon in-jokes, witticisms rub shoulders with jests, and there are enough comedy nods and winks to bring on a severe crick in the neck.

Who is that dashing brute who speaks of hunting and boxing? That polished cove so anxious about his wife? Allen rather spoils the fun by rushing to identify the characters in the dramatic equivalent of 72 point capital letters. One protagonist gives so many clues to his identity, even after giving his surname, he might as well hold a birth certificate up to the camera. It’s all very silly, and more than a little smug, but playing Allen’s historical version of “What’s My Line?” is a lot of fun too.

Central to the film’s success is a cast that finds just the right whimsical tone and is deadly serious about maintaining it. Old pros Fuller and Kennedy revel in being the archetypical rich Americans abroad, Sheen plays the insufferable academic to a T, while McAdams (Morning Glory, Sherlock Homes) confirms she is a comic actor of real talent. Around this lot moves another circle of actors, led by Marion Cotillard’s costume designer, who add luminosity and laughs to Allen’s City of Light tale.

Central to everything is Wilson, the lovable innocent abroad. With his chinos, casual shirts and tweed jacket, Gil could have gone to a clothes shop and asked for an off-the-peg Woody Allen look. As with so many of Allen’s leading men, Wilson’s character gets to live out the director’s dreams, say the things he might say. But it’s a testament to Wilson’s charisma that he doesn’t come across as just another Allen impersonator. He goes his own engaging way, half-chewed caramel nose, soft Texas tones, and all.

Owen brings a new sparkle to Allen’s work the way working in Europe has, on occasion, given the director a second wind in his career. Among his European efforts, Midnight in Paris is as good as Vicky Cristina Barcelona and light years away from the dismal Cassandra’s Dream. In a film about finding the joy in the here and now Allen has mined his own filmmaking past with pleasing results. If the picture that results is not all gold, it glitters brightly enough for these dismal times.

Paul Greenwood's Review

Woody Allen takes a break from the misanthropy of some of his recent movies with this exquisite, warm-hearted comedy drama that stars Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams, above, as an engaged couple spending some time in Paris.

He’s in love with the city and wants to stay there and write, she wants to go back to America. But every night at midnight he finds himself in the 1920s, hanging out with Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, then in the morning he’s back in his modern life, made all the more complicated when he falls for Picasso’s mistress (Marion Cotillard).

Bursting with ideas, this is a wonderful, whimsical romantic fantasy in which every scene delights and every actor excels, with Wilson in particular a revelation as the latest Woody surrogate.

And though it’s often said whenever Allen releases something decent these days, this really is his best work in decades.