I went into Midnight In Paris expecting more of a romantic comedy. After seeing it, I am not sure if I would generally characterize it as that. While there were funny moments, especially at the beginning, the film seemed to lose that fun throughout. I also do not think all of the characters especially the ones in the present were that fun. While that gave it a different feel from romantic comedy, it put themes of this film on a higher level.
One of the most fun things about this film was how it played on famous artists to push the story forward. Throughout the film, Owen Wilson kept finding himself going back in history to meet these famous people. As Owen felt very nostalgic about days gone by, his escape was through time travel, while he was working on his first novel. It was very fun to meet Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Gertrude Stine, and Pablo Picasso. It was also fun to see how his escapes in history at night, came back to influence his day time adventures. One of my ultimate favorite moments was when he met up with a pack of surrealists and explained his time traveling dilemma, which they did not think was out of the ordinary at all. While this was the fun piece of play in the story, at points it did go beyond my scope of the arts, which if I had more knowledge on who all of the people he encountered were, it probably would have been more fun at parts.
While the time spent in history was fun, the time Owen Wilson’s character spent in the present was not as much fun. I was really sad about Rachel McAdams character which was really flat and mean. Along with her family who were very annoying “tea party republican” characters, but as the movie played out this characterization was fully explained. While I found some portions of the story very frustrating, it was interesting to see how certain unexpected character were placed into the antagonist roles, and in such an unintellectual way, which makes sense after seeing the whole film.
This film did drag a bit in the middle third. Once we figured out the game was traveling back in time, and how that moved the main character forward, I was ready to get to the resolution. We did get a bit more time to play in the past world, which was really fun, but once it got a bit more esoteric the fun was lost on me. Maybe I was prepared for a more fast paced film, which we received once we got into the last twenty minutes. This is where we saw that other people could travel back in time, and we very quickly saw that play out in multiple levels. We also got to see how Wilson’s character back in time was really affecting his current life situation, and then we got some fun resolution which was very satisfying.
Overall, I liked Midnight in Paris; it showed me how beautiful of a city Paris is, and made me want to go there. The film felt almost like a travel documentary at points. The story surrounded a fascinating concept, which was well put together, and visually I loved the look and feel of the juxtaposition of present day Paris to Paris of the 1920’s. I enjoyed the idea at the end about how people in the current day believe the good old days or those golden years have passed the current generation by. For me, the most interesting part of this film was watching how everyone reacted to that central theme. (3 out of 5 stars)
