Few people have shaped modern comedy more than Woody Allen. From his directorial debut, Take the Money and Run, you can see elements that are now prominent in the works of Judd Apatow or Todd Phillips: insecure, lovable, too smart for their own good types who get into bizarre situations that should be common sense. Oh yeah, and the numerous cultural references, which have grown broader with time. As Allen's career continued, he reshaped romantic comedies with Annie Hall and Crimes and Misdemeanors.
And yet, for a man so prolific, it's a shame that most see his best days as being behind him. True, there's no chance of Annie Hall 2: On the Rocks, but most see him as an angry old man who hates on religion and politics more than the intellects. In truth, he's as hit-and-miss as most filmmakers, but because of his prolific work and consistent early gems make him seem a little off his rocker.
To some extent, you can say he's lost the plot for most of his movies and is now just rehashing alternate timelines to his classics. It can be said for most of the 00's, if you don't include Vicky Christina Barcelona, which managed to transfer Allen's voice perfectly for the first time into a female embodiment. However, at times Allen seems to be more focused on dramatic, of-it's-time concepts and ends up with something as bad as Whatever Works.
But somewhere in my head, I still have faith in him as a director. I grew up loving Bananas and Deconstructing Harry and while you can find me hard pressed to name a great recent film, I'll still see them all. Deep down, there's usually an intellect and wit hoping to escape and remind us all of why Allen is such a dynamo.
Cue Midnight in Paris.
The story follows Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) and his fiance Inez (Rachel McAdams) on a recent trip to Paris. Gil is a script writer bored with his job and wanting to write what he feels is legitimate fiction: novels. The more he explores the city, the more he falls in love with the concept of finding the right time of day when the city is most beautiful.
During a midnight stroll, he meets F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston) and Zelda Fitzgerald (Allison Pill) who take him on a journey through old Paris where he meets Hemmingway (Corey Stoll), Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody), and Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates). While it takes awhile for Gil to realize he just met all of his literary idols, the inspiration comes immediately and he longs to lock himself in a room and do rewrites to his novel.
It is true that this isn't new territory for Allen. He has explored this concept at least once every 15 years and since then, numerous other meta writer movies have come out to compete with his work: Adaptation, American Splendor...
The only difference between all of them? Allen just managed to school them all. Using a lot of familiar tricks of intellect jealous of superior intellect (played here by Michael Sheen), and cultural references, Allen manages to fine tune them into something more than just words on the page.
He manages to take every character and have their personality jump into some of his sharpest wit in a decade. No matter how small the role is, each character has a moment to shine (the stand out? Corey Stoll as Hemmingway, a lothario obsessed with brave, dying soldiers) and all feel authentically earlier Woody Allen worthy (I'd say Deconstructing Harry good, at least).
While it's fortunate that the wit is some of his strongest, it's also a blessing that in a time when Allen seems to be obsessed with modern romance, he explores how a city, or our heroes, inspire us to live in the modern world by blending in an ambiguous way of numerous time periods. It's a love letter to so many things, and by the end, it's a reminder of why Allen is a master filmmaker.
I'm willing to argue that this can rival his work of the 1980's and may even be better than a few of them. He has managed to find a perfect prototype of the Woody Allen lead character in Owen Wilson, who takes the awkward charm of his dialog and nails it. If anything, this is also probably one of Wilson's best movies and gives him a chance to show what range he has.
While this movie may just be porn for intellectual writers, it's high quality and opens up the chance to think about how our inspiration affects our daily lives. In a way, this is a reminder of how Allen inspires modern cinema by releasing a movie so fun and philosophical that you can almost forgive him for his terrible films like Whatever Works.
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