Speaking of pseudointellectuals, I’ve never—not even at SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE—seen a movie with an audience more vigorously engaged in the signaling to everyone else that, yes, old sport, they got the reference, they’re very smart, they had THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL over for dinner the other night, and this spiderweb of nods to books they read in high school is the funniest thing since that blistering New Yorker piece about parents who don’t get their kids vaccinated. Needless to say, it’s all very Stuff White People Like, which you can tell by their secret handshake, pedantic laughing. The thing is, saying the name Gertrude Stein isn’t funny. It’s just a reference, and like X-MEN: FIRST CLASS winking at its characters’ well-established fates, MIDNIGHT IN PARIS mistakes allusion for comedy far too often. So some of the jokes and most of the non-jokes aren’t particularly funny, in spite of the incessant ovation, but it’s the special determination of Woody Allen that the seventh set-up for Michael Sheen to parade his expertise on some hovel of the humanities is lazier than the film around him yet the smash cut earns a laugh anyway.
Often it’s Allen’s directorial panache, not just the license with which he lets his characters bloviate, that gilds MIDNIGHT IN PARIS. Most evocatively is a sequence straight out of CERTIFIED COPY where Owen Wilson and his lover are talking, presumably about wishing they were born in the romanticized past, as we watch the couple cross a street, but no, that’s a different couple entirely, and here come Wilson and his paramour following in their footsteps. The only groanworthy bit is this farce involving misplaced jewelry that nobody quite pulls off except the brilliant caricaturist Mimi Kennedy (“It’s always the maid”), who should be in everything. Allen’s tracking shots are understated, the better to quietly undercut the blustery characters, and his stroll through Monet’s Water Lillies, not to mention the Monet montage of the opening credits—every establishing shot of Paris is deliciously colored to match a corresponding Impressionist painting—seduces us into Wilson’s world: who wouldn’t want to live in that beauty?
For all the creativity of youth, Hollywood’s wunderkinds aren’t nearly as imaginative as cinema’s elder statesmen—Allen, Oliveira, Resnais—and MIDNIGHT IN PARIS blithely walks into a twist more radical than Allen’s dexterous touch suggests. Describing great art as collaborative, it clarifies, unifies, and rejuvenates the film, and it probably does some things you won’t find in a moisturizer commercial, but as with the reference comedy, Allen leaves it at that, letting the fact of the twist, not the twist itself, give the film its heft. Wilson says early on that nostalgia is denial—though, speaking some more of pseudointellectuals, at no point is anyone in this film talking about nostalgia; they’re all talking about romanticizing the human past, not their own individual pasts—and then spends a film learning the lesson. It’s a thrilling diversion of inspiration and melancholy, but it never gets deeper than that opening thesis statement, and occasionally it gets more obvious. The superficiality reveals Allen’s sly parting shot, as he traces the thread of denial all the way back to blissful ignorance. Like pets responding to sounds, the shallow walk off loving their art without bothering to comprehend it, and MIDNIGHT IN PARIS manages a happy ending that’s as much magic as it is surrender.
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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and recently joined Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.
This is so astute, it makes me question my own enjoyment of the movie. I’ve been wondering if that good feeling I had walking out wasn’t just the humming of a pseudointellectual ego stroked. I fear your words have confirmed it. But all that’s aside from the bouncy fun Allen seems to be having with all his common tropes dressed up easily in easy philosophy. I can’t help but think: if he likes it so much, and it’s as harmless as it is shallow, then maybe it’s okay to like. I can’t deny I liked it, but what’s funny to me now is that the kickstart into wondering why I liked it has taken me to a deeper place than the movie itself did. I should have just left well enough (and light and airy enough) alone.
Dear Brandon,
I applaud you for noticing how that “…it’s all very Stuff White People Like, which you can tell by their secret handshake, pedantic laughing.”
The question I have is, how did you see all of this in a dark theater? It seems as if you relish the idea of catching reasonably well-read White People in the act of being reasonably well-read White People. Did you go to the theater with night vision gear to catch White People in the act of enjoying Woody’s literary references?
Sure, us reasonably well-read Whities do enjoy being able to track Woody’s slightly opaque (to many or most people) literary references, and damn us all! – we do enjoy the trip, too. After all, most comedies, today, offer a mixture fart and scat jokes, mindless sight gags, and Jack Black mugging and eye-rolling.
So, please, cut the horse-pukky psychobabble about pseudo-intellectual White Folk – you don’t appear in the least any more intellectual for your efforts.
Can I present three facts in my favor? 1) I’m white. 2) I liked this movie. 3) I even laughed at it!
In case you don’t know, Stuff White People Like is a site largely about a specific subset of poseurdom, and my complaint is that much of the humor of Midnight in Paris is right in that wheelhouse. Like I said, introducing Gertrude Stein into a film is not funny in itself. Having Hemingway speak in brusque, clipped sentences is (or can be). Why so hostile?
And if it really bothers you that I sort of insulted you by way of complaining about all the people in my particular theater that annoyed me, there’s an implied “in my opinion” through all of this.
But Brandon, in this very thread you said:
“I go for the Manny Farber–which makes me a poseur too–in that I figure nobody cares whether I liked something or not. It’s all about what I saw, not how I reacted to it. The film’s the subject, not me.”
How does that square with an implied “in my opinion” throughout?
In my opinion, X Film is doing this, and these are its weaknesses, and these are its strengths. The film’s the subject, but it’s bouncing off me and onto this page, tainted by my subjective reactions.
I don’t want to give the wrong impression: I’m certainly not calling any audience members who enjoyed it (like me) pseudointellectuals or even suggesting we all gave in to a pseudointellectual moment. But I think the superficiality of Owen Wilson’s adventures in Paris feeds Allen’s obsession with distinguishing between genuine intellectuals and their wannabe counterparts (a false dichotomy if you ask me, but we’re in Allen’s world right now), and in the end, I think the ever self-effacing Allen via Wilson stops worrying and loves his superficial approach. It’s at least as much about identity as it is about what they all call nostalgia.
I honestly couldn’t tell from two readings if you liked it or not. A failing on my part that speaks obliquely to your response: I’m a fan of Allen’s for many reasons. In this context, for the way I relate to a self-effacer’s groping for a legitimately intellectual approach to the problems of life — but who falls forever back on a realization of weak intellectual powers. He claims to have no capacity for the sort of art his own filmmaking heroes create. I believe him. But then he continually suits his stories with all the trappings of those things he can only mimic (or in this case, only reference). He strains a simple message from this latest fluff, and it’s simply received — it’s a “minor insight” after all — but the joy of watching, for me, partly comes from that acknowledged lack of full-on, absorbing intellectual capability. So, I think what I’m saying is, I like Woody Allen movies cause I know he knows he’s kind of a poseur, and I know I am, too. Simpatico in puttin’ on airs. (Please see this very paragraph for an ongoing example.)
Haha, re: your first sentence. I go for the Manny Farber–which makes me a poseur too–in that I figure nobody cares whether I liked something or not. It’s all about what I saw, not how I reacted to it. The film’s the subject, not me.
You, my friend, just BECAME self-effacement.