Having suffered through a busy autumn, I am a little late to the discussion of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. Mr. Allen is at a point, after having directed more than forty films, where people simply ignore his projects when they do not work and draw great attention to those that connect with an audience. He benefits from low expectations, perhaps lower than any current artist who has been so prolific and so successful. For me, his last unqualified success was Match Point (2005), though it was, essentially, a retelling of my favorite Allen film, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). I am level-headed enough not to buy the hype associated with the vastly overrated Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) and to be disappointed with Whatever Works (2009). Still, I can be charmed when stumbling across something I missed, like the forgotten Sweet and Lowdown (1999). I acknowledge Woody Allen’s unmatched success through the 1970s, and I will admit to having asked for, and received for Christmas, a DVD of the charmingly nostalgic Radio Days (1987).
So, with some authority, I can say that Midnight in Paris is good, respectable. It is something that can stand on its own merits. Owen Wilson is a fine protagonist, and Rachel McAdams is deliciously shallow and mean as his fiancée. Michael Sheen gets to imagine what the McLuhan “fan” outside the theatre in Annie Hall (1977) might have been like as a more-rounded character. Marion Cotillard is the pleasant diversion she must be for the plot to move along. If, like Chekhov’s gun, a firearm introduced in the first act must be fired in the second, Léa Seydoux proves that every pretty girl dwelled upon in an Allen movie must become a love interest. The conceit at the heart of this film is that, having once gotten lost at midnight, Owen’s character Gil can find his way back to the same spot each evening in order to ride in a vintage automobile back to the 1920s. Try not to think about it too much – after leaving Ernest Hemingway in a bar, Gil loses ninety years in a flash, but at other moments he can walk around Jazz Age Paris at will by himself – and you can have a lot of fun. Allen allows himself the farcical touches that season his best work: Adrien Brody’s Salvador Dali, obsessed with rhinoceroses; Detective Tisserant pursued through Versailles; Gil outlining the eventual plot of The Exterminating Angel (1962) to a bemused Luis Bunuel. Paris, present, past, and more distant past, is beautiful onscreen.
But the lingering question I have after watching Midnight in Paris has to do with the background an audience must possess to engage with art, a question interrogated by my class in the Fall as they struggled through the footnotes to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Obviously, to enjoy fully what Woody Allen is doing in this film you need, at minimum, to know that American writers spent profitable time in Paris between the world wars. This is what motivates Gil. It helps to know Scott Fitzgerald, though you might wonder if – “old sport” – he really spoke as did his most famous character. Do you appreciate Hemingway, all puffed up and played as a caricature here, unless you know enough about him to know that Allen collapses three or four stages of his development into the mid-to-late-1920s? If you know that much, you might know that he was not speaking to Gertrude Stein by this time, and so he would never take Gil to Stein’s salon, where he meets the brother from whom, in reality, she had been long estranged. You will not catch Gil’s joke about Djuna Barnes being butch unless you know enough to know that Eliot would have likely slammed the door on him for complimenting, ten years later, the juvenilia that first made the poet, by this time turned to serious poetry of religious iconography, a sensation.
Look, I am not trying to be a “Paul,” the pedantic lecturer Allen has Michael Sheen play in order, for all I know, to deflect this kind of nitpicking. By all means, as I said, suspend your disbelief and have some fun in an era I have studied for twenty years. But, as I sat on the couch, thrilled at the unearthing of Bricktop while questioning the commercial value of certain modernist canvases before the Stock Market Crash, I marveled at how difficult it is for any artist to rely on an audience to bring some knowledge, just enough, but not too much, to get the most out of a work of the imagination.
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