Be Here Now: Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris

 Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates, Michael Sheen, Adrien Brody. Dir. Woody Allen, Sony Pictures Classics, 2011

7 lbs of movies #5

I'm always perplexed when I try to write about a great movie soon after seeing it. I'm still in the refractory period, enjoying the post-coital cigarette, and also starting foreplay for round 2. That's a crude analogy, I suppose, but accurate. I'm still in thrall, still negotiating my return to reality, and trying to describe what I just experienced and rate it and put it in a box. I can do that, at times, with product. Art requires a different protocol. 

That reads so precious to me, but it's my truth. I can finish Boondock Saints and shred it ten minutes after I turn off the TV. I can write about Clint Eastwood's Blood Work pretty soon after seeing it. When I finished Midnight Cowboy last night, I felt like being quiet for awhile. It moved me, made me want to sit in silence and smoke and just exist for awhile. That's always a sign of a great film, or novel, or whatever artwork. It stills us, silences us for a moment or two, makes us stop thinking about the mortgage and the kids for a minute and think about - I don't know, beauty. Maybe it stops us thinking, as we generally think of it, at all. Art lets us be in the moment - its moment.

I think that's what I experience, but of course, that's thought trying to articulate action. It's dancing about architecture. It's virtually impossible to be fully in a moment and describe it as it happens. Description requires observation. Observation requires detachment. Hunter Thompson said the only writer who came close to accurately describing an acid trip was Tom Wolfe in Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, and he did it by interviewing hundreds of people and editing their words into a narrative structure, not taking LSD.

Not that a Woody Allen picture is like tripping - though Bananas is pretty surreal - but it's hard to capture in words what I feel when a film like Midnight in Paris or Midnight Cowboy ends, apart from complete. That's the best term, I think. Great stories make me feel as if I now know something I didn't know, but badly needed to. They fill in a little space in me I wasn't aware existed. They make me feel whole.

In a way, that's Gil Pender's dilemma at the start of Midnight in Paris. Pender (Owen Wilson), on vacation in Paris with his new fiancee, Inez (Rachel MaAdams), is a successful screenwriter who wants to turn novelist and doubts himself and his work's validity. He views Paris in romantic terms more associated with the Lost Generation of the '20s, Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Faulkner all carousing the nights away with Zelda and Gertrude Stein in tow, and yearns for that kind of fulfillment in his present life. 

So Paris gives him what he asked for, as Pender finds himself transported every night at midnight to 1920s Paris in a vintage Peugot limo. He meets F. Scott Fitzerald and Zelda at his first stop, who introduce him to a hilariously declamatory Ernest Hemingway, who talks exactly as he writes, and always wants to box or engage in some display of masculinity. Hemingway intoduces him to Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and his mistress, Adriana (Marion Cotillard) who becomes Pender's muse and guide through the past.

Improbable and silly as this might sound, it's a perfect souffle. As Pender's love of Adriana and the past deepens, his engagement in and to the present wanes. Inez and her parents aren't quite the Ugly Americans, but they live in the same zipcode, turning off Gil, who has found his authorial and artistic voice through his time with Adriana and the others in the '20s. The two stories complement one another, and Wilson stammers and shuffles and hems and haws charmingly in each one, tonguetied in the present by his fiancee's banality, and in the past by Gertrude Stein agreeing to vet his novel.

What makes it all work, apart from note-perfect performances by a master class cast and a wonderful screenplay and assured, expert direction from a top-form Allen, is that Allen and Pender both understand you can't live in the past indefinitely. All the great talents he meets in the '20s hearken back to the Belle Epoque or to Twain. Adriana, who leads Pender further back in time, wants to stay in Belle Epoque Paris, where Gaugin and Degas pine for the Rennaissaince. 

Every Golden Age has its own golden age to which it aspires. No one in their present believes it a perfect time because life is never perfect. But that's life. All you can do is live honestly and imaginitively, artistically, within your time. Perhaps someday people will wish they knew you when, but you can only live for now.

Midnight in Paris plays a great trick on us, leading us through this sumptuous, sensuous, intellectual, artistic celebration of all that was great to say our duty is to create that kind of spirit, that kind of greatness, in our own time. A somewhat trite message, perhaps, but in Allen's hands it feels like a revelation, and a bit of a remonstration with a past-loving guy like me.

In sort of a doubled irony, this filmic urge to stay contemporary while revering the past now shows us a Paris that may never be again. Certainly, Notre Dame no longer looks the same, but I've read that over the pandemic year, most of the booksellers and old sheetmusic vendors have died or retired or gone bankrupt, so the booksellers' market may no longer exist, and that many similar institutions may not resume. 

Midnight in Paris now shows audiences another Paris fast going or even already gone by the wayside, reinforcing its modernist message in an unexpected way. Paris, like art and literature, painting and film, will reinvent itself, because new people live in it, now. Because all you can do is live here now.