Midnight in Paris

I don't think I can be objective about Midnight in Paris. In my early twenties I made Paris my home for two years because like the Owen Wilson character in this film I felt sure that this is what aspiring writers did. Every street he wanders down is familiar to me as it fills the screen, and like him, it will come as no surprise to those of you who know me, I got repeatedly lost and repeatedly made discoveries I'll never forget.

I went to this movie with my wife and two daughters, and the action on the screen in some crazy way made me feel as if I was sharing a part of my life that took place before I knew them. This, of course, totally synchs with the temporal transports at the heart of the film.

It also made me file away for future thinking the observation that who accompanies you, like where you see it, can be a factor in the experience of "seeing a movie."

On the way home, I resolved to dust off my copy of Janet Flanner's "Paris Was Yesterday," a book of her dispatches written for The New Yorker in the 1920's. I also reflected on Mme. Tussaud's wax museum, which I felt had just seen animated by the movie, and where, by the way, the figure of Woody Allen is one of the most life-like.

With this film, Woody Allen finds his own animation in Owen Wilson. Allen films divide neatly into those in which he acts and those in which he doesn't. At moments in Midnight in Paris, Wilson delivers his own brand of the well-known frenetic combination of enthusiasm and exasperation that characterizes Allen as actor.

We glimpse a possible relationship between director and actor like the one between Truffaut and Jean-Pierre Leaud, his favorite actor, except here it manifests in outbursts instead of in the subtle build of a French film, which makes perfect sense for an Allen impersonation.

Not as ground-breaking as Annie Hall, not as profound as Crimes and Misdemeanors, not as layered as Hannah and Her Sisters or Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but nevertheless, Midnight in Paris takes its place as a new Woody Allen classic with a message about living in the past and living in the present which we all experience.