A Step Sideways for Woody

This is a love letter to a great city, “Midnight in Paris.” Having finished (for now, anyway) with New York, London and Barcelona, Woody Allen indulges in a tourist’s, and romantic’s, version of Paris. Shots of every famous landmark in Paris start off the film — pull out your Frommer’s and tick them off. Look, there’s Notre Dame. Hey, it’s Montmartre. Oh, and the Luxembourg Gardens, and the Pont Neuf. They look glorious indeed — even better than the ViewMaster reel of Paris sights I had when I was a kid. Gil (Owen Wilson) and his fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams), are sightseeing in Paris for a few days, but he longs to live there, preferably during the 1920s, and walk through its streets at night, preferably in the rain. Inez doesn’t like the rain. Nor does she seem to like Gil very much. She only likes his income as a Hollywood screenwriter. And her parents, who are in Paris too, don’t like anything about him at all. Despite their sneering and hectoring, he follows them around Paris like a good-natured sheepdog, even when Inez runs into a college crush, the pedantic professor Paul (the amusing but underused Michael Sheen) who drags them from Versailles to the Marmottan-Monet Museum spouting pretentious bons mots. It’s classic and hilarious Woody Allen, harkening back to the great Marshall McLuhan-in-the-movie-theater scene in Annie Hall. Gil makes his escape when, lost on a midnight walk, an antique car full of revelers whisks him off to a party where people are wearing flapper dresses and tailcoats. Before long Gil realizes that he has stepped back in time some 90 years, to his ideal era, the age of American expats and French intellectuals, writing, arguing, drinking and thinking great thoughts. Dazzled and delighted, he makes no effort to get back. He’s happy to go with the flow. It’s enjoyable to spot all the ’20s icons — Cole Porter, singing silkily to a bevy of admirers! There’s Man Ray and Dali spouting philosophically at a late-night café. Hemingway shows up, of course, challenging Gil’s masculinity, demanding to know if he boxes or fights bulls. Hemingway brings Gil to Gertrude Stein’s house (why, it’s Alice B. Toklas!) Stein, wonderfully played by Kathy Bates, is brisk and sensible, ready to critique Gil’s novel and help him realize his ambition to be a serious writer. Also hanging around at Stein’s house is Picasso, and his latest muse, Adriana, the luminously beautiful and gravely sweet Marion Cotillard. Adriana and Gil are soon attracted to each other, leaving Gil with a moral and temporal dilemma. The film is no more than a short story expanded to feature film length, and occasionally drags. Everyone says exactly what you expect them to say, and the plot holds no surprises: The ending is completely predictable, beat by beat, and Gil, not much more than a cardboard cutout of a character to begin with, ends up learning a valuable life lesson that can be seen a mile away. But no matter. It’s an appealing fantasy, to travel back in time to ones’ ideal era, and Allen relishes the textures, colors, faces and language of both the ’20s, and then, when Adriana’s wish to return to a still earlier era is granted, the 1890s, she and Gil encounter, of course, Toulouse Lautrec, Degas and Gauguin. Wilson is amiable, and manages to give a simple character some nuance. McAdam injects verve but no sympathetic side into the odious Inez, the straw woman who exists only to highlight Gil’s passive sweetness. It’s not a step forward from Allen’s best movies, just a step sideways, at best. It’s as funny as his best, but much more lightweight. There’s nothing to stay with you other than a gentle happy fizz which bubbles away before you get home. “Midnight in Paris” is playing at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY, and elsewhere. It is rated PG-13 for sexual references and smoking.