Woody
The theme of the latest Woody Allan movie Midnight in Paris has been captured in English Literature many times. “We are living in dreary, unproductive and somber times at the present and we long for wonderful and exciting yesterdays.” The heroes of the past are elevated to glorious heights and we stand in awe of them and, to a degree, worship them.
The poem Miniver Cheevy by Edwin Arlington Robinson sums up a longing for the past. The opening line “Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn, rues the day that he was born,” tells us a lot about him. Cheevy is a common man who never does much, but has many excuses for his lack of achievement.
He says he was “born at the wrong time” and there is nothing exciting or challenging in his own time and place that requires him to exert his many talents. He is sitting at a bar while making his immature dreamer’s fantasies. Eventually he goes on dreaming about the knights of old while he continues to drink at the pub.
In Woody Allen’s movie, a schlock Hollywood “movie writer/director” is in Paris to get engaged to Rachel McAdams and develop his new book. He longs for the 1920s and all its literary allure and artistic heroes. In his mind he has made contact with F. Scott Fitzgerald and his Alabama wife Zelda at a party. Next, he meets Ernest Hemingway at a bar and Hemingway takes him to meet Gertrude Stein, played excellently and believably by Kathy Bates.
Other famous people from the 1920s depicted are Pablo Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, T.S. Eliot, Salvatore Dali and Luis Buñuel. Picasso’s beautiful mistress, Adrianna, is played with great sensitivity by Marion Cotillard, who recently starred as Edith Piaf. A cameo role is played by Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the French Presidents’ wife.
It is really Woody Allen yearning for “old times” as he displays Paris in all its beauty and mystery. What he did for celebrating New York in Annie Hall, Manhattan, Deconstructing Harry, Bullets Over Broadway, Broadway Danny Rose (my favorite) and Hannah and Her Sisters, he does for Paris in Midnight in Paris.
It is not his best, most intellectual film, but it is more than pleasant and always interesting.
