Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris is still in theaters. It’s a fine film, about the nostalgia for the past. But I think there was a lost opportunity. This discussion will contain spoilers, so proceed at your own risk.
The film follows Gil, a screenwriter played by Owen Wilson, with a romantic view of Paris in the 1920s. He magically finds himself able to travel to Paris in the 1920s, where he hangs out with the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Picasso, Gertrude Stein and Salvadore Dali. He falls for a girl obssessed with the Belle Époque, and realizes that someone from what he considers to be Paris’s Golden Age has different thoughts on the matter.
The film by one of the most acclaimed writer-directors alive features multiple Academy Award winning actors (Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody) and the glamorous first lady of France. At some point, you realize that someone from the future might want to hang out with these people. And that’s the lost opportunity with the film: Woody Allen doesn’t really explore that possibility.
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