Name Dropping With a Thud

The canard that Woody Allen is a serious filmmaker gets a crazy boost with the selection of his latest film, Midnight in Paris, as the Opening Night premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Cannes isn’t what it used to be (recently propagating predictable festival circuit trends), but to suggest that the Continental-set Midnight in Paris somehow honors the European art tradition that Cannes once represented is more laughable that any of the film’s actual jokes.

Still bereft of fresh ideas, Allen retells another plot about faithless social climbers—an American couple, screenwriter and wannabe novelist Gil (Owen Wilson) and his rich fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams)—who freeload a trip to Paris where they indulge the man’s cultural pretensions and the woman’s consumerism. Gil fantasizes involvement with Gertrude Stein’s 1920s Parisian salon, hobnobbing with the famous American expatriates F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and pioneers of the avant-garde from Picasso to Buñuel to Cocteau.

It’s another half-thought-out conceit, like Allen’s dreary 1985 The Purple Rose of Cairo, which traduced all modernist theories about cinema history and cultural projection into a slapstick fiasco that was more sentimental than incisive about Depression-era anomie or the 20th-century condition. Midnight in Paris flirts with modern disillusionment—a dated theme—but Gil’s career alienation mostly repeats the shallow boredom of past Allen protagonists. Linking Gil’s bad attitude with the efflorescence of the early 20th-century’s art adventurers would be insulting if those achievements still mattered to today’s uprooted culture.

Stein’s erudition and genuine artistry are irrelevant to the Lady Gaga age. Allen invokes Stein’s genius (casting rotund actress Kathy Bates, yet giving her nothing to do) as carelessly as his once-impudent New Yorker magazine short-story spoofs that helped deflate highbrow tradition by pretending to make it accessible but actually causing it to be dismissed by the mainstream through easy irreverence. Watching Bates play Stein isn’t funny, just a lame impersonation—a form of namedropping.

Name-dropping exposes a middlebrow phony’s primary, social-climbing habit, and that’s the secret behind Allen’s reputation. (For other middlebrows in the media, every Allen film is a returnto-form, a triumph.) His comedies about socially-anxious Manhattanites (even when set in various European capitals) reflect the intellectual affectations that have remained with Allen ever since he dropped out of college, yet drifted toward New York high society. From Manhattan to Hannah and Her Sisters and now Midnight in Paris, he confuses class achievement with intellectual prowess. Allen refuses to admit that same delusion about Gil (or any of his heroes, save in the bold, bridgeburning Deconstructing Harry). Like Gil, Allen wants to be both a Hollywood hack and an East Coast intellectual—traveling to Europe but still carrying his New Yorker as an app on his iPad.

Too bad Allen’s filmmaking is no more cinematic than his New Yorker columns. Midnight in Paris begins with an overture: a touristy montage of Paris, like the overture in Manhattan, but this time Sidney Bechet’s "Si tu vois ma mre" replaces Gershwin’s "Rhapsody in Blue." More name-dropping. Without Gordon Willis’ harmonious monochrome, cinematographer Darius Khondji’s color overture lacks thematic coherence. Allen’s random montage doesn’t prepare for Gil’s reverie, which causes his drift into namedropping fantasyland to appear haphazard, as inept and illogical as the slapstick daydreaming in Purple Rose.

Despite Allen’s reference to "Miniver Cheevy," Edwin Arlington Robinson’s famous poem about displacement, Gil isn’t a man out of time; he merely represents Allen’s affected affection for outmoded cultural totems. Wilson’s bland characterization shows none of the contemporary moral instability that makes his Wes Anderson-esque characters so moving; his casting merely sponges off Anderson’s trenchancy (especially that of the remarkable, Paris-set "Hotel Chevalier" short that served as overture to The Darjeeling Limited). Gil gets one of the film’s best quips when he is smitten by Adriana (Marion Cotillard), the fantasy mistress of Modigliani, Picasso and Hemingway, and tells her, "You take art groupie to a whole new level." It would be a great line if it didn’t inadvertently nail Allen’s personal disorder—and Cannes’.

The groupie-like celebration of Allen’s doubled-up cultural insecurity and ambition represents a global degradation of culture standards. This puts as much of a pall over Midnight in Paris as the predictable romantic betrayals between Gil, Inez, Adriana and the entire "movable feast" of literary and art legends who are reduced to Allen’s simplistic immorality. ("’Prufrock’ is my mantra!" a miscomprehending Gil gloats before T.S. Eliot.) This moral breakdown seeps into the film’s very structure and its hollow, disrespectful humor. One scene shows men individually reacting to Adriana. Man Ray: "I see a photograph." Luis Buñuel: "I see a film." Gil: "I see an insurmountable problem." It’s cute, but then Man Ray tells Gil, "You inhabit two worlds. So far, I see nothing strange," and Gil responds, "Of course, you’re a Surrealist." It’s ruinously trite: Allen abdicates responsibility to present his conceit and Gil’s dilemma with aesthetic consistency.

But then aesthetic consistency and artistic honesty are not part of Woody Allen’s name-dropping scam. (Why is Adriana blamed for acting on the same nostalgia that supposedly makes Gil a philandering romantic?) I was most put off by the gag where Gil gives Buñuel the plot for The Exterminating Angel (Cannes, 1962) and Buñuel responds, "I don’t get it." This is the ultimate insult, following Allen’s past rip-offs of Bergman, Fellini and Antonioni. It’s different from Marty McFly in Back to the Future paying-back Chuck Berry’s inspiration. Allen (Gil) is an art-poacher; his cinematic inferiority doesn’t excuse his failure to appreciate the artistic, philosophical breakthrough of his betters.

>>Midnight in Paris

Directed by Woody Allen 

Runtime: 100 min.