Sledge Reviews "Midnight in Paris” Starring Owen Wilson

My wife and I were running out of movies to go see this past weekend when this one caught our eye (mainly, the cast and crew did.) So we gassed up the truck, drove the four miles north, and took a chance on a film we'd heard nothing about . . . Not a single trailer, commercial, or mention from friends.

Now I know why.

There's not much of a plot and very little happens. But somehow, it did marginally entertain both of us. Though I'm not sure why. Maybe it was the glimpse of a real plot?

Midnight in Paris is one of those movie scripts that make you wonder why the writer and director ((Woody Allen) didn't take the movie to the next level. It was a damn cool idea and could have been outstanding, but he left us feeling short-changed.

At barely over 100 minutes long, one would expect a simple story, but that wasn't the problem. Allen missed chance after chance to pop the cork and let the genie out of the bottle. The plot was a mix of the wonderful 1980’s flick Somewhere in Time and the first installment of Back to the Future. What Allen tried to do was compelling, but he wrapped the film’s central theme with three current-day, paper-thin characters written by a first year college student (I can’t believe Woody Allen was really involved in this half-effort.)

Rachel McAdams as Inez was hateful, disinterested, boring, and a waste of her fine acting talents. She did look good as a blonde, but that was not enough. I wanted to beat her with a cast iron frying pan so she would leave the screen. Her character, as well as her parents, was forgettable and a major distraction to the plot. There was no point to any of them. They didn’t add anything to the story and could have been dropped from the script all together.

On the flip side, Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein and Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway were outstanding and great fun. Especially Stoll, who brought Hemingway’s eccentricities to full intensity. Owen Wilson was charming, though a little too much of a hopefless romantic for my tastes.

Unfortunately, I am not much of a history buff when it comes to anything that happened before I was born, let alone Paris of the 1920’s, so I couldn’t appreciate Allen’s effort to introduce us to many of France’s most notable artists. Allen must have assumed the audience would be stuffed with wide-eyed historians, who would catch all the (often subtle) references to supposedly famous writers and artists.

I did learn one thing historically . . . back in the 20's, apparently French artisits spent all of their free time getting loaded at the local tavern. Maybe I would have fit into their world after all?

Then there was the ending: abrupt. Almost like Allen was tired of the making the movie and called it a day.

The million dollar question: Would I recommend this movie? The answer is maybe. Go see this flick if you are a history major who likes time-travel plots mixed in with a potentially wonderful love story that never goes anywhere. Otherwise, wait for it on cable, like I wish I had.