Title: Midnight in Paris
Country: United States of America
Language: English
Year: 2011
Cast:
- Owen Wilson
- Rachel McAdams
- Kurt Fuller
- Mimi Kennedy
- Michael Sheen
- Nina Arianda
- Carla Bruni
- Léa Seydoux
- Yves Hek
- Alison Pill
- Tom Hiddleston
- Sonia Rolland
- Corey Stoll
- Daniel Lundh
- Thérèse Bourou-Rubinsztein
- Kathy Bates
- Marcial Di Fonzo Bo
- Marion Cotillard
- Emmanuelle Uzan
- Adrien Brody
- Tom Cordier
- Adrien de Van
- David Lowe
- Yves-Antoine Spoto
- Vincent Menjou Cortes
- Olivier Rabourdin
- François Rostain
SYNOPSIS
A family travel to the French capital for business. The party includes a young engaged couple who are forced to confront their differing views of a perfect life.
REVIEW
Midnight in Paris is an interesting movie about travel, art, and history. Because of the time travel element, it brings to life some of the greatest artists and literary geniuses of all time. It is set in the beautiful city of Paris, France.
Gil Pender is in Paris with his fiancée Inez for a few days. Gil accompanies Inez and her friends to museums and other tourist sites to learn about art and history, like most tourists. I also like to go to the museums whenever I travel, although I usually forgo the guided tours.
Gil inexplicably travels back to the 1920s at the stroke of midnight, where he gets to interact with his idols Cole Porter, Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Pablo Picasso, to name a few.
Gil thinks the best time to live would be in Paris during the 1920s, and he'd willingly choose to live then if he could. Although I've always been curious about how people live at different periods throughout history, I never really thought that I'd prefer to live in a different time.
Carol ?: What's a nostalgia shop?
Paul ?: Not one of those stores that sells Shirley Temple dolls and old radios? I never know who buys that stuff. Who'd want it?
Inez ?: Well, people who live in the past, people who think their lives would have been happier if they lived in an earlier time.
Paul ?: You know, nostalgia is denial. Denial of the painful present.
Inez ?: Gil is a complete romantic. I mean, he would be more than happy living in a complete state of perpetual denial.
Carol ?: Really?
Paul ?: And the name for this fallacy is called 'golden age thinking'.
Inez ?: Touché.
Paul ?: The erroneous notion that a different time period was better than the one one's living in. It's a flaw in the romantic imagination of those who find it difficult to cope with the present.
Gil Pender: Adriana, if you stay here, and this becomes your present, then, pretty soon, you'll start imagining another time was really your, you know, was really the golden time. That's what the present is; that it's a little unsatisfying, because life's a little unsatisfying.
The movie is also about writing and literature. Although Gil is a successful screenwriter, he'd rather try his hand at writing a novel. He wants to write about things that fascinate him, and he wants to work on something he's proud of.
Inez ?: See, but the problem is, when it comes to his writing, he has absolutely no respect for anybody else's opinion.
Ernest Hemingway: No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms grace and courage under pressure.
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Midnight in Paris
