Woody Allen's time-travel movie nails one dark truth about the genre |
Fifteen years ago, I graduated from college with a literature degree and absolutely no idea what to do with it.
The world outside campus felt bleak and unstable. The economy was still clawing its way out of recession, journalism jobs were vanishing in real time, and the vague millennial promise that intelligence and hard work naturally translated into success had started to reveal itself as a lie.
Months earlier, I had read The Great Gatsby in a single sitting. The Sun Also Rises had become one of my favorite books. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and their hazy, wine-soaked vision of Paris had become less like history and more like mythology to me.
So when I saw Midnight in Paris in the summer of 2011, it landed on me with almost embarrassing precision.
The film was my introduction to Woody Allen, whose complex, controversial legacy I was totally unaware of at the time. What captivated me wasn’t simply the fantasy of time travel, but the way the movie treats it as a literary device. Every night at midnight, in the same remote Parisian square, Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) — a nervous, soft-spoken screenwriter desperate to become a novelist — slips into 1920s Paris, where he drinks with Hemingway (Corey Stoll), befriends Zelda (Alison Pill) and Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston), gets Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) to read his novel, and falls in love with the idea of artistic greatness.
The genius of Midnight in Paris is that it indulges this fantasy completely before quietly dismantling it.
Even rewatching it 15........