Midnight in Paris: Better living through better longing

Nostalgia is longing for a past that cannot be returned to—it’s passed. The word is used a lot in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, whose protagonist, Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), a dissatisfied Hollywood screenwriter, is writing a novel about the owner of a so-called nostalgia shop and wants to move to Paris so as to bask in a dream of what it would have been like to be a writer in Paris in the 1920s. The word nostalgia has also been used, and will be used plenty more, in all the exegesis surrounding the film. But in every case it’s used incorrectly.

My point here isn’t semantic; what I want to say is that Midnight in Paris, a great Woody Allen movie, is about something different and, in this context, more interesting than nostalgia, something that seems especially personal to Allen. It’s at the root of some of Allen’s most enduringly charming work, such as The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), and if one were inclined, if could be suggested as the root of Allen’s attraction to much younger women both onscreen, as in the magisterial Manhattan (1979), and off. Midnight in Paris is about fantasy, about the life or the youth or the love you never had at all, yet somehow seems to be slipping away from you with every moment. What Gil longs for never existed, and when he somehow slips away into some realm where his fantasy’s made real, his passage from one place to another is delightfully left unexplained. What makes this very funny film resonate, what imbues its whimsy with wisdom, is its understanding that even in fantasy our longing for that distant, obscure thing must reach its terminal point, and we have to start again, negotiating with the real world, or some rough approximation of it.

Gil is engaged to Inez (Rachel McAdams). They’re “doing” Paris with her parents, and will be unexpectedly joined by Inez’s pedantic former professor Paul (Michael Sheen). Each of these characters are pragmatists who condescendingly dismiss Gil’s impulse to leave both the US and the movie business, and while they’re at it they dismiss his novel too. One night Gil goes off alone to wander the Paris streets. On a particularly lonesome bend, at the stroke of midnight, he’s picked up by a passing car and taken to someplace where everyone parties like its 1922. He’s repeatedly told he “looks lost,” so it seems he’s found the right generation. He meets Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, and eventually Man Ray, Buñuel, and Salvador Dalí, (Adrien Brody, who wipes the floor with Robert Pattinson and is wildly funny as he arbitrarily obsesses over the image of a rhinoceros). Gil also meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), who wants to go into fashion, is mistress to the likes of Picasso and Braque, and seems drawn to Gil’s odd sort of melancholy cheerfulness (a combination perhaps only Wilson can conjure so naturally). Like Gil, she also idealizes the past—her belle époque is his 1920s. So their hypothetical romance has a hitch: neither is living in the present.

Wilson is wonderful, emotionally dexterous and taking full ownership of what might otherwise be just another Woody surrogate. Cotillard is deeply alluring. The only weak link is McAdams, though I’d guess it’s entirely Allen’s fault since he’s written Inez far too flatly, telegraphing her obvious incompatibility with Gil from scene one… Well, not quite scene one: Midnight in Paris opens with a lovingly prolonged series of images of the Paris, shot by Darius Khondji, set to Sidney Bechet’s ‘Si tu vois ma mére’, with no close-ups of faces and, highly uncharacteristically for Allen, no voice-over. This lovely foyer to the narrative is all about place, about senses and seduction, about how time just keeps passing us by, and about projecting fantasy onto reality. Which, sometimes, is the best way to remind yourself where you really are.

Wrecked: lost, beaten, alone, oblivious

It opens bleary-eyed, gurgling itself into what may or may not be its protagonist’s waking state. He’s battered, trapped, at a complete loss as to where he is or how he got there. It was early enough in the wintry morning that I felt not entirely dissimilar as I settled in. I went into a press screening of Wrecked with my preferred amount of foreknowledge regarding its content, contributors, and genre: I didn’t know a damned thing about it. If you’re likewise ignorant of these factors and are still inclined to see the film anyway, by all means, stop reading. Having said that, the following comments shy away from excess synopsis. Wrecked, a US/Canada co-production, is assuredly simple, a modest yet promising double-debut from two resourceful Canadian filmmakers, director Michael Greenspan and writer Christopher Dodd. So I’ll try to keep this review simple too.

Here’s where we start: Adrien Brody finds himself trapped in a car that’s smashed into a tree in a dense forest. Corpses he doesn’t recognize slouch in the backseat. He’s got no food and little water and the radio assaults him with fuzzy, dated pop hits. (Tiny Tim eerily trills away twice in one weekend; Insidious also uses ‘Tip-toe Through the Tulips’ for retro-creep-out effect.) He seems to suffer from amnesia. He has no idea how to negotiate his survival in this place, wherever it is. The only words spoken during the first 15 minutes are largely torrents of expletives. In keeping with Brody’s desperate, frazzled state, Greenspan and Dodd deftly manage our degrees of orientation. The camera angles even make it difficult to discern up from down. It’s hard to know what’s even meant to be real: when you can barely remember a thing about your life it seems your dreams and hallucinations conform to your immediate circumstances.

Okay, okay, Brody does get out of the car. He makes friends with a dog that’s pretty easy to love. He starts crawling on his belly. Bleached-out flashbacks accumulate. Here’s more: there’s a radio broadcast regarding a bank robbery in Abbotsford. But how presumptuous should we be about the significance of this shard of clearly significant information? More interestingly, how presumptuous should Brody’s character be? Dodd wisely gives him little to say, resisting killing time with needless jabbering. Brody works fluently with what’s he’s got, sometimes using his nasal voice to simply aid his arduous forward movement. Sound design and music emerge as unusually dominant elements, and Michael Brook supplies both with equal parts evocation and ambiguity. I can assure you that it’s all going somewhere, but it’s uphill all the way, and looks pretty painful. Still, if you’re curious, you might just want to follow along.

Pros and cons: The Brothers Bloom

Wayfaring grifters, the brothers Stephen Bloom and just plain old Bloom—the latter presumably having lost his given name in a Polynesian poker game, or perhaps while convalescing from ennui in some Alpine hospice—have toured the world in search of ever-more risk-courting and inventive cons, but the lifestyle’s no good anymore for Little Bloom and hasn’t been for some time. He wants out, but is persuaded into the proverbial one-last-big-score by his tireless elder. Their ultimate mark is a lonesome and preposterously wealthy heiress with a fantastical, perhaps autistic penchant for collecting and perfecting hobbies, making her something like all of the Tenenbaum children rolled into one. Over the course of our story she’ll inevitably move from being a surprisingly formidable victim to a brilliant accomplice.

That reference to The Royal Tenenbaums just sort of slipped out, but it’s tough not to let such references accumulate when trying to describe Brick writer/director Rian Johnson’s second feature, which has been crafted top to bottom with the sort of cutesy comic pageantry and fraternal drama which Wes Anderson has made his domain for well over a decade now and with considerable success. The Brothers Bloom has been craftily titled so that it ends with both a surname and a verb, though, despite the avalanche of plot and the truly magnificent efforts of its actors, it’s hard to say if anyone or anything truly blooms here since the movie itself is often so stiflingly manicured as to preempt anything so spontaneous as discovery. Right from the prologue, which finds the Blooms as children already working elaborate ruses and dressing themselves as Amish undertakers, which ends with a prematurely cathartic slow-motion climax, replete with exultant Rod Stewart bursting through the speakers and an explosive announcement of the film’s title spelled out in lights, we’re meant to feel really excited about what we’re seeing –even before its even properly begun!

The casting is ideal. Maybe too ideal. Adrien Brody brings the same melancholic amiability, uncertainty and romantic longing to Bloom as he did to Peter Whitman in… Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited. His scarecrow physique seems custom-built for heroes who wilt like a frail weed when they suffer but are just as easily swept up in the winds of an exuberant game plan. As Stephen, Mark Ruffalo is all charm, and I mean all. He’s so charming it seems he could con himself right out of existence. (He’s also one of my favourite screen actors to watch eat.) Rachel Weisz as Penelope, the mark, is so damn good that she frequently makes what should be an annoying artifice of a character into a gas, walking with the gait of a 12-year-old who hasn’t yet figured out she has the body of a rather fetching and shapely thirtysomething woman. Robby Coltrane arrives on the scene to ham it up with absolute mastery. Sadly, Rinko Kikuchi, who didn’t get to talk in her Oscar-nominated performance as a deaf teen in Babel, still doesn’t get to talk while playing Stephen’s sidekick, a demolitions nut rendered as a tired stereotype of mute Japanese cool.

So we’ve got terrific actors, a dazzling and diverse array of locations, and a little Asian girl who wears kooky costumes and lives to blow shit up. We’re having fun! Or so we’re often reminded. With it’s deluge of sight gags—Penelope’s casual smashing of her car into a brick wall is admittedly a real winner—and shower of winky literary nods, there’s an eagerness to impress on display throughout The Brothers Bloom that most of us can’t help but feel kindly to, the way we might indulge some precocious kid who just can’t wait to show you her entire collection of rare stamps or, more fittingly, magic tricks. Narrated by magician Ricky Jay, The Brothers Bloom is finally an ode to the pleasures of getting fooled, of slight of hand and fast fingers. But the hand guiding this tale is too slight by half, giving us a good enough time when its all just a lark, but fumbling things up when he expects us to invest more deeply in the emotional journeys. I’d have been content with mere showmanship.

Hollywoodland: an uneven dance with Californian gloom, going nowhere memorably

The suicide of George Reeves might not have pulled many flags down to half-mast at Hollywood’s film studios back in 1959, but it probably unleashed some kind of rampant emotional trauma among the millions of American kids who worshipped Reeves from his starring role on TV’s Adventures of Superman. Though he began promisingly with a part in Gone With The Wind, Reeves’ career never lived up to his aspirations and never lived down the role of the underwear-clad alien superhero that audiences came to identity him with completely. Despondent and without prospects, Reeves shot himself in the head in his Benedict Canyon home at the age of 45. Or so it seemed…

The lingering ambiguity surrounding Reeves’ death is the engine behind Hollywoodland, the feature debuts of director Allen Coulter and writer Paul Bernbaum. Framed by an investigation pursued by private detective Louis Simo (Adrien Brody), Hollywoodland’s a dark bit of Tinsletown self-reflection, an indictment of the circuitry of corruption linking the Hollywood studios with the LAPD, and an ordinary story of one more lost soul chewed up and spit out by the movies.

Brody’s bruised and amused as a cynical opportunist, Jake Gittes with a broken family and without a real career. Ben Affleck convinces as Reeves by contrasting a self-conscious phoney actor’s charm with striking glimpses of inner despair, reminding us that he was actually pretty good as the guilt-ridden lover in the underrated Bounce. Diane Lane, playing Toni, a Warner mogul’s wife and Reeves’ not-so-secret sugar mama, sympathetically embodies middle-age desperation in a town where a woman’s looks count for almost everything. It’s a shame her character’s gradually abandoned to a sort of generalized, theatrical gloom, muttering in a darkened room.

This is the stuff that terrifically lurid movies are made of, but Bernbaum’s approach, in tandem with Coulter’s, sabotages the richer, more resonant aspects of the material by focusing on the attempt to expose a possible cover-up –which goes nowhere– rather than on the conditions that brought about Reeves’ demise. It’s especially disappointing considering the talent in front of the camera. (At the same time, the nowhereness of the film is what's stuck with me the most since seeing it....)

Hollywoodland looks like it got stuck searching for a solid narrative when its sense of atmosphere and emotional texture could have been its strong suit. It’s interesting however that this failed narrative was trying to emulate the wonderfully perverse dynamics of Sunset Blvd: the older woman supporting the washed up talent while actually doing nothing for his career, that unforgettable claustrophobic love affair referenced right down to the message Toni has inscribed into Reeves’ watch: ‘Mad About the Boy!’ It’s an admirable sort of homage, even if it only makes Hollywoodland look even paler by comparison.