The Ultimate Writer's Fantasy

It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen a film so inspiring that I’ve devoted a post to it. But Sunday I saw the film that has been touted as Woody Allen’s best film yet - and I have to agree, It was a near perfect portrayal of the ultimate writer’s fantasy - that is to be magically transported to a time when you could rub elbows and commiserate with all of history’s most famous writers and artists. Only movies can offer such magic.

"Midnight In Paris" is about every writer’s idea of heaven. It is also perhaps the most ebullient of all his creations given the fact that almost all of his films are comic treatments of a very dour world. Allen has been a cynic all his life, ever since his first film where he mimicked Groucho Marx in stating his philosophy, "I’d never belong to a club that would have me as a member."

And for a Francophile like myself, the film was not only a writer’s fantasy but also an amorous adventure that delves deeply into all the wonderful romantic mystique that engulfs Paris. My entire life I have loved France and everything French. I studied the language for seven years in high school and college, came one course short of a minor, and was at one point at Boston University fluent. I’ll never forget my last French final at BU. The requirement was to read a one-page essay and then conduct a five minute conversation about it with the prof. To most of the students, five minutes was an eternity and everyone was terrified. Since I was a film student, the subject of my essay was the French New Wave and I started a dialogue with the prof about the likes of Francois Truffaut, Jean Renoir, and Cocteau. The next thing we both knew, the bell was ringing. We had used up the whole hour. It was the biggest high of my life. I had spoken to her for an hour as if I was a native Parisian. I had become fluent.

Every French professor I’ve talked to in the last 35 years has assured me I can be fluent again any time if I can just manage to immerse myself for a few weeks in Paris, something I’ve always wanted to do. Before she got stricken with Alzheimer's, I used to corner Jane Ryan, a French teacher at Southfield High School, at family parties and go off to a corner to dialogue with each other. Within fifteen minutes, I’d be carrying on a broken conversation. Jane kept telling me I needed to go to Paris. If I could recapture that much in just fifteen minutes, I could recapture everything in fifteen days. As recently as this year I’ve been consulting with a French professor at Oakland University for help translating the French dialogue that’s in my screenplay. (There have been French themes in almost every script I’ve written.) Even she has told me I need to go to Paris.

After leaving the film on Sunday night, I felt like booking my flight right then and there. It is already being called the perfect promotional film for the Paris Chamber of Commerce as it is a story that very much takes the American tourists point of view. This has all come on the heels of this beautifully written memoir that I read a few months ago called, "The Piano Shop On the Left Bank," about an American writer in Paris during the 1990s who decides to take up piano at middle-age. He has many creatively charged adventures exploring piano shops on Paris’ famed Left Bank. So, yes, after all that, Sunday night I was ready to book my flight.

"Marley & Me" star Owen Wilson plays Gil, a very successful Hollywood screenwriter who is vacationing in Paris for the first time with his fiancee and plans to have the wedding there. Gil is a sweet, charming, enormously talented guy with just one flaw - he thinks of himself as a hack because he works in the movies instead of doing what he really wants and that’s writing the Great American Novel. So he has come to Paris to get married, he has come to Paris to explore the most creatively charged city for artists in the world, and he has come to Paris to write his first novel.

Of course, Woody Allen’s main characters are always self-portraits. And there’s nothing particularly unusual about this attitude. Almost all immensely talented people come to some stage in their lives where they regret their choices and wish they had done something else. After he retired, Frank Capra said he thought he was an okay filmmaker but that he might have been a great scientist if he had only gone in that direction instead. Charlie Chaplin felt he wasted his life; he really thought he might have been a great composer, this in spite of the fact that he composed the music for most of his great films. There was a marvelous documentary about Clint Eastwood on TCM a couple weeks ago in which he said he had a ruined life because he might have been a great jazz pianist if he hadn’t gotten "distracted" by the acting. This is a very common theme. Read the autobiographies of the masters. They all seem to think they were merely adequate at what they did, but could have been great at something else. There is a yearning in all of them that they could have and should have done something great with their lives, this despite the fact that they did.

So the question arises: if Gil is Woody Allen’s alter ego and Gil thinks himself a hack because he’s writing screenplays instead of novels, does Woody think he’s a hack for making films? Is Woody really a wistful novelist? He even has Gil speaking a very denigrating line about film, "Screenplays are easy, novels are hard." Yet doesn’t everyone think that what they do is easy and other things are hard? Well, I think there are a few people who are very good at both who would say screenplays are harder. Certainly most of the people who are good at both (one example is my screenwriting mentor in Detroit) would say they both have their challenges and that neither is easy. But it is an interesting question. Is Woody Allen, at the age of 75, saying through Gil that he’s wasted his life making movies and that he should have been a novelist all along?   If you go by the public and critical responses to "Midnight In Paris," nothing could be further from the truth.

As the story progresses, Gil arrives in Paris with his fiancee, Inez, played by Rachel McAdams and immediately sets out to discover the romance of Paris. The problem is she’s not much interested in his idea of romance, which is to explore centuries-old streets which many famous writers have walked on, and sit in the same cafes where many of history’s greatest artists have worked. Her idea of fun is dining in modern five-star restaurants and shopping at obscenely expensive antique stores. She wants to spend $50,000 dollars on a single chair for their living room in Malibu. He’s well-paid; they can afford it. But when he objects to the frivolous nature of the extravagance, she reprimands him, "Cheap is cheap."

Naturally, they soon find themselves going their separate ways, she off with friends to club-hop, he staying in the hotel room to work on his novel. Late every night, he goes for a walk to draw inspiration from the streets of Paris. Then one night, as the clock strikes midnight, he is picked up by a group of strangers driving a 1920s Duesenberg, and taken to a nightclub where he finds the likes of Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Picasso, Bunuel, and Gertrude Stein, all alive and well and creating.

All dead writers from the 1920’s, all part of the clan of artists who occupied Paris during the 1920’s and became known as the "Lost Generation," and they’re all there, preserved and thriving. He has been magically transported back to the most lively period for the arts that Paris has ever had.

As I said, it’s the ultimate writer’s fantasy. Not only is he able to rub elbows with the geniuses he has admired most of his life, but they actually treat him as an equal, quite the contrast from the modern-day literary snobs that Inez prefers to keep company with, pseudo-intellectual asses who take delight in trying to impress people and putting down anyone who dares to challenge them, mostly Gil. There is even a scene where one such ass while on a museum tour insists that Rodin never married his wife. The tour guide, an expert on Rodin, tells him flat out he’s wrong. He very rudely tells her to do more homework, but she is emphatic that she is certain. And of course she is. One of the delightful turns in the story is how Gil comes to the defense of the tour guide, played beautifully by Carla Bruni, the real-life First Lady of France.

Pseudo-intellectuals are common characters in all of Allen’s films. The characters he traditionally plays are usually this type. So what is he saying by portraying the true geniuses of history as decent down-to-earth people who actually treat each other and strangers with courtesy and respect? Ernest Hemingway becomes Gil’s mentor. Gertrude Stein reads Gil’s manuscript and critiques it, pointing out its flaws and showing him how to improve it while being clear she thinks he’s a writer of great promise. As I said, every writer’s ultimate fantasy. But is Allen, at the age of 75, finally saying that the true geniuses are good people and that the snobs, whom he has always celebrated in his past films, are all wrong? Is he saying that he’s been wrong all this time? I tend to think the answer is yes.

It’s clear from the first five minutes that his relationship with Inez is doomed, that the whole point of this trip is for him to realize how wrong they are for each other. She likes money, he likes to be creative. She’s pushy and arrogant, he’s intelligent and reserved. She wants to inhabit night clubs. He wants to walk the streets of Paris in the rain. She’s a spoiled brat. He’s a down-to-earth romantic. Where was the attraction to begin with? Why are they together? I can’t remember another Woody Allen film where the female lead is so one-dimensional and utterly lacking in redeeming qualities. He is a filmmaker who loves women and his films have always been Valentines. It’s okay that Inez be completely unlikeable, but it’s totally unlike Woody Allen to give us a major female character but no hint as to what brought this very shallow woman into the company of someone as noble as Gil.

One of the most delightful scenes was actually an inside-joke that only the most avid film buffs will catch. While having a conversation with Spanish film director Luis Bunuel, Gil tries pitching one of Bunuel’s most famous films to him, a good 40 years before he was to make it. He pitches the story of Bunuel’s 1962 masterpiece, "The Exterminating Angel," a story of a group of people trapped in a room they can’t get out of. "But why can’t they get out?" Bunuel asks. "It doesn’t matter," Gil explains. "It’s an allegory." "But of course it matters," Bunuel insists. "The audience has to know why they can’t get out of the room." Gil finally gives up and says, "Well, I think someday you’ll think this will make a good movie." It’s hilarious that Bunuel is reacting to his own pitch the same way any modern studio executive would be. Is this another slam at today’s film industry, that classics like "The Exterminating Angel" could never be made today?

Another delightful story element was a friendship he develops with Adriana, the muse of Picasso and Hemingway, among others. Played to perfection by French bombshell Marion Cotillard, she and Gil form an immediate bond, she being very attracted to his earthiness, he being enamored not only because of her ethereal beauty but because he knows all about her place in French history and of all the artists who flowered from her inspiration. They quickly become a couple (so what if she’s old enough to be his great-grandmother?) and she gives him the royal tour of 1920’s Paris.

But then things take an unexpected turn. She suddenly escorts him into an entirely new dimension and they are now in 1890s Paris and enjoying the atmosphere of La Belle Epoque, France’s version of The Gilded Age. And this is where Gil has his big revelation and Woody’s theme comes full circle. He’s enamored of the 1920s because that, to him, was the Golden Age. But she is not. To her, the Lost Generation is the present and the present is dull. To her, the good old days were the 1890s and that’s the period she longs to inhabit. But they are no sooner in the 1890s when they meet the famous artists of that era, all of whom are longing for the Renaissance and the era of The Bard. And that’s when it hits Gil. Adriana is chasing a phantom. And so is he. As he explains to her, if these great artists could indeed go back to the Renaissance, they would surely find that Shakespeare is longing to meet the artists of ancient Greece. That, to them, would be the good old days. But it’s all a fiction. There’s no such thing. There are no "good old days." Everyone, everywhere, thinks their present is dull and that the past is good. But this is only possible with rose-colored glasses and a very selective memory. There is no glorious past. There is only the present. Our job here in this life is to make the best of our present, and it can be wonderful or terrible or just plain dull entirely depending on our own attitudes and the choices we make.

So Gil has learned his lesson. He’s found what he came to Paris for. He’s going to fight for his present. He leaves Adriana in the 1890s and comes back to present-day Paris to begin his new life, and a new life means ending his engagement to the spoiled and totally self-centered Inez and setting out to explore life as a writer in Paris. As he walks the streets of Paris that night, he intentionally avoids the neighborhood that lead him into the past. Now he’s interested only in his future as fate has him running into the very attractive down-to-earth Parisian woman from the antiques shop. They exchange pleasantries, it starts to rain and, lo and behold, she likes walking in the rain too. So they walk away together, a perfect ending to a near-perfect film.

You cannot watch this film without falling in love with Paris unless you’re already dead-set against the French to begin with. There was just one very quirky scene that really threw me. After his tryst with Adriana when he is back in the real world the next day, he scours an antique book shop until he finds Adriana’s diary. Keep in mind this is not a fictional character. At least according to the reviews, she was a real person and both Hemingway and Picasso had affairs with her. So he grabs the book and has the Rodin tour guide read it to him. Much to his shock, she mentions Gil in the book as one of her loves; in fact she refers to him as the one true love she might have had if he had not disappeared. So what is this all about? What is Allen trying to say here? It seems it’s not a fantasy after all, that Gil really was transported to the 1920s and actually became part of that history. But then Allen completely drops it. It is never mentioned again and the purpose of the scene seems to be little more than to give us another delightful encounter with Carla Bruni.

But these are minor flaws in an otherwise great film. As I started with, this is the most ebullient of all Woody Allen’s films. It is by far his most positive and optimistic film. He is saying to live for the present. He is saying that it is a good world if we only choose to make it that way. He is saying all the intellectuals snobs are wrong and that the true geniuses are good people. This is all quite a refreshing perspective coming from a 75 year old who’s been a cynic all his life. It has been said that "Midnight In Paris" is not only Woody’s best film to date but that it is a rebirth for him beginning a third wave of his career at 75. I would say that it is a rebirth for him in more ways than one.


Postscript:
While on the subject of fantasy, I would like to announce that my friend George in San Diego has just launched a new web site for his financial services consulting firm. One interesting item on his new site is a paper he has recently authored exploring the "science" in science-fiction, with particular emphasis on three very famous science-fiction franchises: Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, and Lost In Space. Science fiction has been a hobby of his all his life and his paper has received much positive feedback from scientists and engineers who are also space experts and sci-fi buffs. For those who are interested, the link is below.

George H web site