Thursday, June 16, 2011

Playtime

Midnight in Paris (2011)
directed by Woody Allen
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
seen on the screen at Manor Theatre

Although there is unarguably something half-assed about his screenplay (it's as if Rachel McAdams and her family exist solely to get in a few jabs at the Tea Party), I almost admire Woody Allen's disregard for the shelf life of these late-career films. Gil finds Adriana's diary at a book stall near the Seine and uses it to try an unsuccessful come-on back in the 1920s, but the entry never happened - at least, it never does - and so the diary and its memories should never exist. But small stakes make for small losses, and the joke that Gil gets caught pilfering his fiancee's earrings in an effort to seduce a ghost more than compensates for that unworkable paradox of time.

I, for one, was delighted that a Woody Allen film allowed a woman to endure as the moral and emotional compass, without subjecting her first to any number of condescending remarks on behalf of the male protagonist. Gil is smitten from the moment he sees Adriana, and Owen Wilson - kinder than most Woody Allen stand-ins, even effortlessly so - is sincere in his surprise, gentle with his impositions (on Gertrude Stein, on the company of the shopkeeper he meets in the city), and truly touching when he delivers his soliloquy about the beauty of a world full of people in a cold and inhospitable universe.

The impressions are broad but captivating, in a funny, nonsensical way; even Hemingway, a cornball from the first, is permitted to say something lovely about death and nearness. Allen treats it all with a touch so light it's careless, but my heart hasn't swelled quite that way at the movies since I don't know when. And yes, I'm a little embarrassed by that. I know privilege when I see it, but how many men in their mid-seventies still say that heaven is the modern world?