Escaping to Paris

To be honest, the trailer for Midnight in Paris made me a little worried. What it looked like: Owen Wilson spends the Paris daytime and evening with his fiancée Rachel McAdams only to embark on a series of wild escapades after midnight (without fiancée in tow). While the trailer depicted mostly mirth on the part of Wilson’s character and mere befuddlement on the part of McAdams, I assumed the worst for whenever Wilson’s secret world of the Parisian night collided with the stricter world of the Parisian day.

But this film is more like a fairy tale than a charged examination of the modern relationship. The film, as I discovered in reviews a few weeks ago, does not deal with life’s darker spots as I imagined it might. The glimpses of nights out of the town in the trailer still happened in the film as such…but they “happened” in the distant past of 1920s Paris among members of the Lost Generation rather than in the present day. That knowledge might not seem to change a whole lot until you meet Inez (McAdams) and realize what a horror she is (along with her parents). That and the film is so effortlessly charming and—in its way—playfully naïve. The dream of Gil Pender (Wilson) is, after all, one of nostalgia. Not a childhood nostalgia either—Bender yearns for the past of his artistic heroes. He freely admits that he would prefer Paris of the 1920s to the Paris of the modern day. The film grants his wish.

Gil Pender (Wilson) waits for midnight to strike; via mybestmediasearch.com

Allen does not deign to explain the mechanism of time travel (or fantasy) in the film. This oversight saves him from worlds (no pun intended) of trouble. I suspect that most other writers would feel pressed to provide at least the remotest shadow of a reason for space-time-continuum-distortion, but Allen gives us the bare minimum to work with: a particular street corner at midnight and an older car (with a famous art celebrity inside) is enough to gain access to the wormhole. (Or however you’d like to explain it…)

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So in a charming way, Midnight in Paris functions a little more like a fantastic time machine than a film; it’s a pretext for Bender (and by extension, we assume, Allen himself) to travel back in time and meet his idols. The horde of personalities you meet includes the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway, Picasso, Buñuel, Dali, Stein, Eliot, and Cole Porter, among many others.

In that sense, I don’t think Midnight in Paris is all that different from some of Tim Burton’s work. The feeling I get watching Burton’s work (particularly Big Fish, but also Edward Scissorhands) is that the plot and the characters have all been almost artificially gathered around a bunch of key images and ideas. You can see this tendency in the “frozen-in-time” circus scene in Big Fish as Edward Bloom (Ewan McGregor) pushes away the tossed popcorn and when Edward Scissorhands starts giving haircuts. Allen, in much the same way, wanted to sneak back to Paris of the Roaring Twenties and witness a heated critique session between Stein and Picasso and hold a conversation with Dali (loosely) about rhinoceroses. (The plural is actually either “rhinoceros” or “rhinoceroses;” also…for that overwhelming group of potential zoologists in my readership…a group of rhinos is called a “crash.”)

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This is all a polite way of saying that Allen’s film, boiled down to its basic ingredients, is a flight of fancy. The crux of the story, of course, is that Bender must learn not to bury himself in nostalgia and learn from the past while holding it at arm’s length. The solution, Allen teaches us, is not to treat Paris as a nostalgic fairy tale place but rather as a happy medium between the past and the world of Bender’s present—Hollywood and the empty world of cheap rewrites and awful fiancées.

via imdb.com

But what I found so curious about this film is that while Allen addresses the problem of escaping into the past, he notably makes no remark on the equally fascinating problem of escaping into art—something that should not be ignored, given Hemingway’s presence in the film. (I’m sure Papa would rather have me out hunting right now than glorying over his screen appearance.)

What Allen does provide in the film, however, is an obvious enemy of ours in the form of Paul Bates (Michael Sheen), the pretentious intellectual type that Allen has written into a number of his films. Bates fosters the closed-minded attitude of knowledge-of-art-for-knowledge’s-sake that the film openly despises (inspired by Rodin’s mistress, etc., etc.). In figuring how to deal with artistic escapism, I think we need to look at Bender’s experiences in the past. His forays into 1920s Paris are fascinating not only because these men and women were world-renowned artists, but because they were interesting people who led interesting lives. We need to keep the human element in sight even as the art seemingly surrounds us.