FINAL FILM CRITIQUE

Final Film Critique

Final Film Critique

Introduction

The movie chosen for analysis in this paper is “Midnight in Paris”, which is written and directed by Woody Allen Starring Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams and Marion Cotillard.

Story Telling

The movie might be subtitled The Uses of Nostalgia. It opens with a montage of Paris scenes set to 1920s jazz: Allen is hinting that the city's glorious past is still alive for those with eyes to see it. That turns out to be true for Gil, who wanders off on his own one night, gets lost, and picked up by a '20s Peugeot that takes him to a party. Eventually he realizes that he has disappeared into the Paris of the era he has dreamed about, and he sees Cole Porter playing his latest tunes on the piano; among others on hand is F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway (Edelstein, 2011).

In Gertrude Stein's salon, he meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), an aspiring designer who has an embattled affair with Picasso. The magic of the past liberates him: the '20s have become real because they are so real to Gil. His writing grows more confident. He also realizes the limitations of nostalgia -- unlike Adrianas', who wish she were living during la belle époque in Paris, the 1890s.

This charming fable has links to Allen's 1985 Depression-era comedy The Purple Rose of Cairo (perhaps his best picture), in which Mia Farrow is a small-town waitress whose naive love of movies brings a character right off the screen to romance her, also to his hilarious short story "The Kugelmass Episode," where a world-weary middle-aged New York Jew finds himself in the pages of Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

Allen always seems to be at his best in these mishmashes of literary parody, romantic comedy and Pirandello. In one scene, merrily recycled from "The Kugelmass Episode," Gil wander through an antique bookstall and comes across Adriana's memoir--with his name mentioned in it. In a scene from the '20s, he runs into filmmaker Luis Bunuel and suggests the plot of The Exterminating Angel, which Bunuel directed, famously, in the '60s.

(Bunuel listens to the bizarre, symbolic storyline and responds with "I do not get it.") The casting of characters from the past with familiar faces from the present inspired--Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein, Adrian Brody as Salvador Dali, and Corey Stoll from TV's Law & Order: LA as a hilarious Ernest Hemingway speaking in Hemingwayesque prose. Alison Pill plays Zelda as a frizzy-haired Dixie spark plug, and Cotillard, with her melted-butterscotch voice and delicate shifts of emotion, is as indelible a screen personality as the waif-like Margaret Sullavan was in Hollywood in the '30s (Mandeville, 1992).

Acting

The acting was good in this movie. Leave it to Woody Allen to take the notion that Paris is magical. Allen bathes the city in rain, romance and a healthy dose of the whimsy he used in The Purple Rose of Cairo, to give screenwriter Gil (Wilson) a wild adventure. While his shrill fiancée (McAdams) shops, Gil wanders the ...