Midnight in Paris

Written and Directed by: Woody Allen

To many critics, Woody Allen has lost his touch recently. To those critics, Woody Allen throws this film straight back in their face.

Gil (Owen Wilson) is a writer, on vacation in Paris with his fiance, who has a nostalgia for the creative renaissance that took place in the 1920s. On a late night walk, he somehow stumbles into the past, running into such expatriates as F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston) and Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll). He falls in love with a French muse in the 1920s - who, herself, is in love with a different past - and strains to maintain a life in both time periods Eventually, he has to make a choice...

The film itself is not very long, but that is a testament to Allen's crisp and efficient filmmaking. There is nothing irrelevant in the movie and it doesn't try to be any more than it actually is. It is a simple story of a man trying to live in the present while also idealizing the past. Granted there are some surreal factors which need to be accepted to advance the story and the historical figures are generally reduced to caricatures, but the interactions between the contemporary characters is spot-on realistic without being dramatic.

To classify this film as a comedy is to reduce it to the simplest factor. It has dramatic moments, and the central inter-character conflict is between Gil and his romanticism against his fiance and her desire for something more. Exaggeration aside, the story is almost Shakespearean as a comedy - there's a serious central conflict, moments of humor, and nobody dies at the end. In most Shakespearean comedies, the characters must exit the city and head "into the woods" - a surreal distortion of society - to learn about themselves, and in this film Owen Wilson leaves the present and moves into his idealized distortion of the past. All exaggeration aside, the film is Shakespearean in its style.

The performances of the actors are all spot-on. Owen Wilson manages to portray the typical "Woody Allen" character well without falling into cheap imitation. He exudes all the mannerisms and eccentricities while also making the character his own. The actor who stole the show, though, was Corey Stoll as Hemingway. He spoke like Hemingway's prose and not-so-subtly showed the manly-man Hemingway persona. His speech about "making love to a good woman" is one of the best monologues in quite a while.

I highly recommend this movie. It's sweet, fun, romantic, and light, while also being an example of great filmmaking.