Midnight in Paris

I just got back from seeing the new Woody Allen comedy Midnight in Paris, with mixed feelings. The bad news was that the movie does one of my least favorite things a movie can do. The good news was that I still enjoyed it pretty much.

Let's start with the good news. One of the fun parts of the movie is getting to see famous people pretend to be other famous people, in particular Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali. The movie is probably better the more you know about Paris in the 1920s, which in my case is not much. I got the feeling I was missing out on a lot of in jokes. Nonetheless, scenes with the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein were a lot of fun.

Getting back to the bad news. The movie is set up as a conflict between romanticism and pragmatism, with Owen Wilson's screenwriter-turned-novelist representing romanticism and his fiance, Rachel McAdams, representing pragmatism. But that's putting it charitably; really, Allen writes McAdams' character as a shrew with no redeeming qualities. Right from the very first scene we see her crapping all over Wilson and his dreams, which seems to me to be a big mistake from a storytelling perspective. If they started out happy and in love, there would be a real conflict. Instead we spend the whole movie waiting for him to dump her. It's too bad because I really like Rachel McAdams. It says something that her role in Mean Girls as "evil takes a human form in Regina George" was far more sympathetic than her character in Midnight. The thing the movie does that I really don't like is that it sets up an argument, but represents one side in such a bad light that there's really no argument at all. There's something to be said for romanticism and something to be said for pragmatism, but not as embodied by McAdams in this movie.