Perhaps the most potent problem of our modern era is its obsession with nostalgia. In its least malignant form, nostalgia becomes an excessive love of art and fashion playfully removed from the socio-political conditions of its creation. In its most malignant form, nostalgia turns people into cult-like fascists who desire a return to a time that never really existed. Most nostalgia travelers rest somewhere between: fantasizing about going back to something that felt more familiar, even at the expense of the present. And then there’s Midnight in Paris (2011), which seems to relish in misery, imagination, and nostalgia at varying points and for varying purposes. What ultimately does the film say about nostalgia, then?
Midnight in Paris follows Gil (Owen Wilson), a Hollywood script doctor disgruntled by the artlessness of his work, who visits Paris with his fiancé Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her parents, all wealthy socialites. Utterly in love with the city and its Modernist past, Gil fantasizes about moving there to make an honest go at becoming a novelist, much to the chagrin of Inez, who cannot fathom a life outside of the United States. They eventually run into the horrifically pedantic Paul (Michael Sheen) and his wife Carol (Nina Arianda) and are coaxed on several sightseeing trips. In frustration, Gil wanders Paris alone one night and mysteriously ends up in 1920s Paris, where he stumbles upon many of his favorite writers and artists and immerses himself in their world. And the more linked to the past, the more disconnected Gil becomes with his life in the present, even as new love blossoms and he comes to realize what his present is doing to him.
For the most part, Midnight in Paris is a bewildering film. A central problem with the way Midnight in Paris frames its exploration of nostalgia is its confusion about what that message should be. If we use the first thirty minutes — comprising the film’s central “realism” section — we’re left to assume that nostalgia is romantic, beautiful, and wonderful. Yet, Inez’s protestations about Gil’s delights in fantasy about living in Paris — with rain, because he loves the rain and she very much does not — along with her parents’ revulsion at Paris, its people, its food, its very existence all paint a dreary picture for Gil’s life. I’d be remiss not to mention that I also found nearly every character in these opening 30 minutes utterly unlikable figures: Gil for his endless lyrical waxing about the past and everyone else for their pretentions and cruelties so potent it’s a wonder the film didn’t melt.
Once we leave these opening minutes behind, we’re granted what I can only describe as Woody Allen’s love letter to the 1920s. Caricatures abound as the likes of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill), Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo), Salvador Dalí (Adrien Brody), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), and more show up in the story. Naturally, all but Hemingway take a liking to Gil. His forays into the past are playful, vibrant, and nearly everything Gil could ever want. Even his eventual relationship with Adriana (Marion Cotillard) is passionate and romantic despite Gil’s clear wish to violate his relationship with Inez. Here, the message is clear: the past is actually wondrous and beautiful even if it’s not perfect, and this is where an artist like Gil might thrive. This is also the central conceit of time travel in Allen’s vision: midnight in Paris takes you back to the time you most fantasize about.
By the time the film starts to backtrack on these ideas, it’s almost too late. Adriana’s preferences for an even earlier time before, Gil reminds us, antibiotics is meant, I suppose, to say something potent about not living in the past. But given that Gil’s final act at the end of the film is to break up with Inez and move to Paris to be with the delightful Gabrielle, a French nostalgia shop owner (much like the character in Gil’s novel), that message loses steam fast. Even the horrifically pedantic Paul tries to tell us the message when he explains the meaning of “nostalgia”:
Nostalgia is denial. Denial of the painful present. The name for this denial is Golden Age thinking – the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one ones living in – its a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.
Yet this idea applies to almost nobody in the film except Adriana. Gil isn’t in denial; indeed, he doesn’t even flinch when he reminds us that Adriana’s love of the Renaissance is both just a thing everyone does (we all have our own past golden age) and untenable. Nostalgia doesn’t solve the problem of the dullness that arises from the present . And yet the film’s only offering for a solution to either side of this is simply “live in the moment.” And that, as most of us know, is a message that only applies to those with means. Most of us can’t simply pick up and move to Paris, no matter how much we dream.
Really, Midnight in Paris feels more like Allen’s obsession with Paris as a temporal palimpsest. The film is almost infatuated with the history of that city and the way that history is painted upon its streets and buildings. Gil is our conduit to this vision, but he is also our reminder that there are three worlds relying on the misery of the real, nostalgia, or present-ness. The real present — not Gil’s new fantasy world — is devoid of imagination and miserable. It’s cruel and accusatory, judgmental and without vision. The nostalgic world is bright and vibrant, confusing and hospitable, but it is also painful and unattainable. Meanwhile, the present-ness of Gil’s newfound world is, at least for the wealthy, grounded and connected, full of life and possibility and not afraid of the past or the future.
These three worlds are the real takeaway here. Midnight in Paris is a difficult nut in large part because it is overly infatuated with its caricatures and doesn’t want to settle into a focused message. Yet, it is a reminder that there is value in nostalgia even if we’re not meant to overly indulge. Nostalgia is an escape from the misery of the real, one that can be a trap, as it is for Adriana, but also a gateway into something better. While I don’t think Midnight in Paris explores these ideas with the depth necessary to make them stick — and that largely because I think Allen is overly and tiringly interested in the amusement of his caricatures — they’re still there in kernels of thought. Kernels, alas, don’t really help us with the misery of nostalgia of our present, which has continued to build into a malignant cancer rubbing its sticky body upon everything. On this, you’re probably better off with Back to the Future (1985).
