Midnight in Paris – Review
Midnight in Paris
Review by Ralph Lucas – Publisher
I need to begin with an admission or two. First, I dislike Woody Allen and have trouble separating the man from the artist. I believe that a bevy of apologists cannot fix the man who married his adopted child. Second, once upon a time I was a fan of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories, but especially his memoirs of Paris in the 1920s compiled in the slim book A Moveable Feast and published three years after he took his life. Finally, I used to be a fan of Ray Bradbury way back when, and always enjoyed his literate approach to science fiction and fantasy storytelling. And so with that baggage I trotted off to see Midnight in Paris primarily because it costars a couple of Canadian actors, Rachel McAdams and Alison Pill.
Fully prepared to not like the movie simply because of its writer and director, the opening act quickly establishes Gil (Owen Wilson) as the Woody Allen character, which he plays to perfection, and Inez (Rachel McAdams) as the woman he is supposed to marry but should escape from as quickly as possible. Gil is a highly successful screenwriter who is trying to leave that and the Los Angeles lifestyle behind. He has written his first novel. But, as McAdams has been quoted as saying, "Inez is used to having her way. Gil wants to stay in Paris. Inez wants Gil to keep writing lucrative screenplays so they can have a comfortable life in the United States. McAdams effectively transmits the spoiled brat bitchy fiancée she is playing so well you actually become uncomfortable every time she opens her mouth to deliver Allen’s lines. To my surprise I was beginning to like the film, which was, after all, selected to open the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.
The relationship between the two lead characters becomes jeopardized with the appearance of an old pal of Inez, the know-it-all Paul (Michael Sheen) who is one of those show-off intellectuals. Inez has had a crush on him since college but Gil thinks he’s the pompous ass he really is. After a trying night out together, Gil opts to walk home.
Instead of going on to a night of dancing, Gil, lost, tired and a little confused, sits for a while and watches the traffic flow up a narrow, winding Paris street. A clock nearby strikes midnight and the next car coming up the hill is a 1920s limousine. It pulls up opposite Gil and the people inside coax him into joining them. Now the magic begins.
The romantic comedy shifts subtly into fantasy or sci-fi but never strays too far from its core. We know before Gil does that he has slipped in time. When the couple introduce themselves as F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston) and his wife Zelda (Alison Pill), Gil thinks he’s at a costume party. Then he’s is introduced to his hero, Ernest Hemingway, acted with impeccable bombast by Corey Stoll. Stoll presides over some of the funniest scenes in the movie and his over-the-top macho dialogue captures the essence of the man that has come down to us through some sort of intuitive understanding of the famous writer even if you’ve never read a word he has written.
When Gil wakes the next morning he thinks at first it was all a dream. When he tries to drag Inez along she just doesn’t have the patience and splits for their hotel just as the clock strikes midnight again. Gil now understands he has found a portal to the past, which he visits again and again to the point where his future father-in-law has become suspicious of his midnight ramblings and hires a local detective to follow him. That leads to another funny but unnecessary scene toward the end of the movie.
The key to Allen’s marvelous portrait of Paris is Paris itself. Largely unchanged for decade after decade, the ease of moving from one era to another – and at one point to another – using real locations is seamless. If you didn’t know it was impossible, this film goes a long way to convincing you otherwise and more importantly, almost makes you wish it were possible. As Gil makes his nightly escapes into the past we get to meet and spend time with Gert (Gertrude Stein) played superbly by Kathy Bates, as well as with Pablo Picasso and a whole list of famous people from the past. The most important one is Adriana, a girlfriend of Piccaso’s played by the exquisite and beautiful Marion Cotillard. When she first meets Gil she comments on his tie. When Picasso met a girl named Marie-Thérèse Walter who would become his mistress and model she did not know who he was but supposedly made a comment about the tie he was wearing. The portrayals, these sorts of details and the timeless beauty of the city itself lend credence to the idea behind the film. I can’t spoil the film by revealing the truth that time travel is impossible, but in the end Gil gets to live the life he wants in the present and that is Allen’s greatest message here.
The other thing we have is great filmmakers, and with Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen reaffirms his genius as a writer and director. I may never be able to change my opinion of the man, but I plan to see this film again. There is a timelessness about this instant classic. It’s like some new version of It’s a Wonderful Life or Casablanca, in which Humphrey Bogart’s character Rick Blaine says, "We’ll always have Paris." I think we’ll always have Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.
Midnight in Paris is distributed in Canada by Mongrel Media. It opened in Toronto and Vancouver on Friday, June 3, 2011.
Ralph Lucas is the founder and publisher of Northernstars.ca. He began reviewing movies while in radio in Montreal in 1976.
Stills from the production by Roger Arpajou © 2011 Mediapro, Versátil Cinema & Gravier Productions, Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. Used with Permission.
Barney’s Version – A Review
Barney’s Version
Review by Wyndham Wise
(December 29, 2010 – Toronto, ON) Richard J. Lewis’ Barney’s Version is the third screen adaptation of a Mordecai Richler novel, and in terms of quality, it rests somewhere between Ted Kotcheff’s 1974 The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, widely acknowledged to be a classic of Canadian cinema, and 1984’s Joshua Then and Now, also directed by Kotcheff, which by all accounts was judged to be a failure.
The movie begins with a flashback to Barney Panofsky’s (Paul Giamatti) misspent youth in Rome in the early 1970s. In the novel, the setting is Paris, but Richler’s loveable curmudgeon has a cult-like following in Italy and producer Robert Lantos had no trouble securing Italian financing for this co-production. Among Barney’s gang of carousing layabouts is a hard-drinking aspiring writer named Boogie (Scott Speedman) and a loopy, free-spirited ‘hippy chick,’ Clara (Rachelle Lefevre from the first two Twilight movies). Barney, the responsible one of the
group, has already launched a reasonably successful business enterprise, exporting olive oil back home to Canada. His idyllic existence is suddenly cut short when Clara becomes pregnant, and he believes the child is his. This leads to a shotgun wedding, the birth of a stillborn mixed-race baby (the father turns out to be another of Barney’s buddies) and an unpleasant end for everyone involved.
With this set-up complete, the movie jumps to the present with Barney back in Montreal. He is a now a successful television producer with a company called Totally Unnecessary Productions (TUP), which is apparently a satirical poke at Alliance Communications, the company co-founded by Lantos in the 1980s. To deepen the in-joke, TUP’s most successful series is something called O’Malley of the North, and Paul Gross makes a cameo appearance as a Mountie dressed in full Red Serge, recalling his most famous role in Due South, a series produced by Alliance. In one brief scene, David Cronenberg has a comic turn as an exasperated TV director. (Directors Atom Egoyan, Denys Arcand and Ted Kotcheff also make cameo appearances throughout the film.)
Barney might be successful but he needs a wife to complete the picture. He unwisely chooses a high-maintenance Jewish Princess for the ‘second Mrs. Panofsky’ (Minnie Driver), but on the day of his wedding he falls head over heels for the beautiful Miriam (Rosamund Pike) whom he pursues relentlessly until she finally gives in. In the meantime, Boogie, now a serious alcoholic and drug addict, wanders in and out of his life until Barney catches him fucking the second Mrs. Panofsky. After a blowout between the two, Boogie dies in mysterious circumstances and the second Mrs. Panofsky leaves him, giving rise to the suspicion that Barney might have killed Boogie. Certainly a dogged Montreal cop (Mark Addy) thinks so, and Barney is haunted by Boogie’s death and hounded by the cop throughout the rest of the film.
His divorce clears the way from him to finally marry Miriam. They start a family and live in bourgeois bliss for a while, until Barney’s philandering manages to screw things up again and she eventually leaves him for another (Bruce Greenwood).
Director Lewis and first-time screenwriter Michael Konyves faced a tall order in adapting the popular, Giller Prize-winning novel, and they have met the challenge with uneven results. Certain characters are rendered in cartoonish proportions that are way too aggressive. For example, Driver, as Barney’s ill-chosen bride, is directed to play her Jewish-Princess role to the hilt. It’s an unpleasant caricature and often difficult to watch. Dustin Hoffman, on the other hand, appearing sporadically as Barney’s rough-edged but warm-hearted ex-cop father, is wonderful. He steals every scene he’s in, and Hoffman and Giamatti seem wholly at ease with each other, together comprising a miniature story within the movie.
The cinematography by the veteran Guy Dufaux is superb, the art direction by Michele Laliberte and production design by Claude Paré is first rate, and it’s perhaps the best film ever made about the television business in Canada. Look for it to clean up at the Genie Awards in 2011, and Giamatti (who already has a Golden Globe nomination for best actor) and Hoffman are serious Oscar contenders. Unfortunately, Lewis (whose only other feature as a director is Whale Music) has a knack for turning the movie’s various story strands – a murder mystery, a bittersweet romance, a buddy comedy – into the equivalent of an expensive, up-scale movie of the week. The film lacks a certain cinematic flare. Even if you can forgive the crude caricatures and the shameful way it attempts to make you weep, you’re still left with great actors stuck in a too-cautious script with pedestrian direction.
Also see: The Cast & Crew of Barney’s Version.