A Review of Midnight in Paris by S. Linwick for J. MortonDirected by Woody Allen
Written by Woody Allen
Starring Kathy Bates, Marion Cotillard, Tom Hiddleston, Rachel McAdams, Alison Pill, Corey Stoll, and Owen Wilson
Score:
Midnight in Paris didn’t fail to elicit consistent, hysterical laughter from the balding sexagenarian sitting across the aisle and one row ahead of me in the Minneapolis movie theater. Accompanied by a matronly woman in an orange, linen shift dress, the mirthful man in question sported a linen, button-down shirt of the same hue, carefully pressed cargo shorts, and a pair of those fashionably sensible KEEN sandals. In other words, Midnight in Paris charmed Woody Allen’s target audience: the (probably) neurotic, white, heterosexual, liberal, (upper) middle class male.
That’s not to say that Midnight in Paris didn’t entertain me. In all fairness, it’s a pretty film. At times it’s even a pretty hilarious film. But its initially humorous characters eventually wind up seeming rather hollow. Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill), and Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), for instance, ultimately come across as merely mediocre caricatures. Moreover, although the protagonist Gil (Owen Wilson) is certainly cute and comical, he isn’t particularly complex or compelling. So as the final credits started rolling, I found myself wondering, “Huh. That’s all there was to him? That’s all there was to Midnight in Paris? Um, okay.”
But I don’t mean to suggest that Midnight in Paris disappointed me. It didn’t; my expectations for it weren’t that high in the first place. Of course class, race, and gender are basically non-issues in this flick. As I noted, Allen’s films generally cater to neurotic, white, heterosexual, liberal, (upper) middle class males. That’s why money, for example, never really presents a problem at any point in the picture—not even for time travelers like Gil. Everyone in Allen’s (transhistorical) Paris also appears to be of European descent. Indeed, in a piece on the treatment of race in legal culture, Jerome McCristal Culp, Jr. (Professor of Law at Duke University) denominates the dismissal of “‘identity politics’ as unimportant to understanding the law and doing justice” as the “Woody Allen Blues”—i.e., the “liberal establishment’s inability to deal with race and identity.” “The six-line chorus that gets repeated by the ‘Woody Allen Blues,’” Culp explains, “is that if we do not speak of race, then racism does not exist” (512-13).[1]
Who knows? Maybe Allen is just loath to imagine a world in which a guy like him who faces problems like his isn’t always the center of attention. That would shed light on why even lesbians only dote on men in this movie. Stein’s famous lover, Alice B. Toklas, does make a brief appearance, but shortly after Hemingway hails her, she fades into the shadows so Stein can tend to Pablo Picasso, Hemingway, and Gil. Likewise, Djuna Barnes evidently materializes for the sole pleasure of a quick caper with Gil. Gee, what a wonderful world this would be—well, maybe for Woody Allen or the man in the orange, linen shirt.
[1] Jerome McCristal Culp, Jr., “The Woody Allen Blues: ‘Identity Politics,’ Race, and the Law,” Florida Law Review 51 (1999): 511-28.
