Midnight in Paris

Movie Review

An American in ‘Paris’: Owen Wilson is transported to the City of Lights — past and present

May 27, 2011|By Ty Burr, Globe Staff

Wilson with Carla Bruni, as a museum guide (above), and Rachel McAdams,… (photos by ROGER ARPAJOU/SONY…)

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MIDNIGHT IN PARIS Written and directed by: Woody Allen

Starring: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates, Michael Sheen, Carla Bruni

At: Boston Common, Kendall Square, Coolidge Corner, Embassy Waltham

Running time: 100 minutes

Rated: PG-13 (some sexual references and smoking)

“Midnight in Paris,’’ Woody Allen’s 41st feature film, is a sweet-natured trifle, as flavorful and as thin as a crepe. It stars Owen Wilson as Gil Pender, a hack Hollywood screenwriter and struggling novelist who takes a series of late-night walks while visiting Paris and finds himself transported back to the expatriate era of the 1920s. There Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) holds court for such buzzing luminosities as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tim Hiddleston and Alison Pill), Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, and so forth.

It’s a delicious conceit, and Allen milks the absurdity. Gil plops down at a cafe, and at the next table are Dali (Adrien Brody), Buñuel (Adrien de Van), and Man Ray (Tom Cordier). A cab door opens and there’s T.S. Eliot fresh from “The Waste Land.’’ In the rues the women come and go, talking of Pablo Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo).

That they’re all caricatures, as cartoony as a great-author drawing on a PBS book-bag, doesn’t really matter. Stoll’s Hemingway is a terrific creation: a ripe, macho, adverb-free punch line of a young Papa. Gil’s a caricature, too — the hand-wringing Allen neurotic we’re so familiar with — and so are the people in his modern-day life: his shrill fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams), her horrid parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy), a pseudo-intellectual prat (Michael Sheen) with one eye on the Louvre and the other on Inez’s legs.

Anyway, caricature is all Allen has offered us for many years now, and his movies are best when they’re up front about it. “Midnight in Paris’’ has the brisk, gimmicky half-life of one of Woody’s New Yorker sketches. Next to calamities like last year’s “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger’’ and 2009’s “Whatever Works,’’ this has to count as an improvement.

There’s evidence that Allen wants to go deeper, though. For one thing, this is the rare movie to take Wilson’s disconsolate side seriously — the knowledge that being a bland, blond Hollywood stud isn’t all it’s cracked up to be — and the actor responds with a performance that’s sadder and more soulful than what’s on the page. More to the point, Woody hangs his own need for nostalgia out to dry, or he pretends to.