Time Crisis: MIDNIGHT IN PARIS

Welcome back! In our last installation of Time Crisis, we narrowed our focus down to a single day with the loop film Edge of Tomorrow and its exploration of the choices that we make about the time we have. This month, we’re going to take a break from science fiction to focus on another crucial aspect of our experience of time: the stories that we tell ourselves about past eras in our history. To get into this topic, let’s take a look at Midnight in Paris, a time-jumping fantasy comedy that transports its protagonist to Paris in the 1920’s.

Back in my introductory article, I mentioned that the universal feeling of being trapped in time is a driving force in the creation of time travel fiction. Nostalgia, the affinity for or desire to return to an earlier time, is a common manifestation of this feeling. While we’re often nostalgic for past eras of our own lives, such as our childhoods, many feel a nostalgic longing to experience a time they didn’t live through based solely on historical knowledge. This longing is often fueled by a well-documented cognitive bias called the Golden Age fallacy, which is the incorrect assumption that some prior era is better than the present, morally or culturally.

A certain degree of nostalgia can be good – history contains an abundance of material which can and should serve as inspiration to artists. But too much adulation of the past can become a toxic delusion, used as a shelter to escape the realities of the present, and destructive to artistic progress. Midnight in Paris explores the line between good and harmful nostalgia.

Midnight in Paris: A Time-Jumping Throwback

Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is a moderately successful Hollywood screenwriter, on vacation in Paris with his materialistic fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her straight-laced parents. Gil is conflicted – the artistic history of Paris inspires him to make a real attempt at finishing his novel, but his fiancée pushes him to give up on his romantic literary notions and stick to his lucrative but creatively unfulfilling screenwriting gigs.

While on a nighttime walk to escape Inez and her abrasively pretentious friend Paul (Michael Sheen), an inebriated Gil is approached by a twenties-era automobile full of anachronistically attired revelers, who invite him to come along to a party. Gil obliges and soon discovers that the party is full of people who by all appearances are creatives of 1920’s Paris. He meets F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston) and Zelda Fitzgerald (Alison Pill), witnesses a live Cole Porter performance, and talks writing with Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Stunned but delighted by this development, Gil goes back every night, waiting for the car at midnight to take him to the company of his creative heroes.

In many ways, Midnight in Paris resembles the earliest versions of time travel fiction, harkening back to pre sci-fi stories like Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and others where a protagonist suddenly finds themselves in the past, usually an era with some legendary historical import. Owen Wilson is the perfect foil for the whimsical concept – he’s one of the few actors with the sincerity to make the character’s accepting and joyful reaction to his objectively insane experience feel believable. He’s also able to brim with enthusiasm for the art and literature of the 1920’s without alienating the audience with esotericism or pretension.

We’re endeared to Gil further by contrast with Michael Sheen’s Paul, a man who has no genuine love for art but uses his surface-level knowledge of it to show off his education and seduce Inez – Rachel McAdams‘ meanest performance since Mean Girls. Gil’s clashes with Paul and Inez provide enough conflict and humor to keep the scenes in the present interesting enough to stand up to the scenes set in the past. 

Time Travel in Midnight in Paris

The mechanism of time travel here (magic car?) is unimportant, and deliberately so. The transition from present to past is seamless in the sense that no seams are shown: buildings don’t magically de-age, the car doesn’t disappear into thin air. A lesser version of this film would have built in more rules as a way to drive the plot – maybe Gil would end up trapped in the past if he didn’t get back to the present by a certain time, or some similar hand-waving logic. Instead, the film focuses on the creative and emotional conflict brought about by Gil’s encounter with the past.

Midnight in Paris’ biggest strength lies in its vivid depiction of the 1920’s Paris, brought to life by a cast that nails their portrayals of cultural icons without falling into caricature or cheap impressionism. Corey Stoll as Ernest Hemingway is the standout, pulling off the writer’s manly pronouncements with believable confidence. Adrien Brody is slightly more cartoonish as Salvador Dali, flanked by his not quite as famous surrealist buddies Luis Buñuel (Adrien de Van) and Man Ray (Tom Cordier). Even if you don’t catch all of the references to the more obscure figures, the performances are so vividly drawn that you get a sense of who the people are, which can be fortified by a few Wikipedia searches to enhance future viewings.

The Infinite Regress of Nostalgia

In this fantastical world that fulfills his every nostalgic longing, Gil ultimately learns that his focus on the past is misguided, and that the people he idolized were just that – people, with fears, anxieties, and nostalgias of their own. The handling of the thematic content is one of the film’s weaker aspects – it hammers its point on the nose, hard. Still, the flawless execution of the concept combined with Wilson’s earnestness makes the whole thing work.

Gil is introduced to a young woman named Adriana (Marion Cotillard) – the only fictionalized character that we meet in the 1920’s. A student of fashion design who is dating Picasso and has captured the attention of Hemingway, she’s quite literally the woman of Gil’s dreams. Gil’s infatuation with Adriana causes him to question whether he should be marrying Inez, a woman with whom he has nothing in common.

Gil and Adriana experience a recursion of what’s already happening to Gil – an ornate horse drawn carriage comes along, which to Adriana’s delight takes the pair to Paris’ Belle Epoque, the object of Adriana’s own nostalgic preoccupation. There they meet Degas and other post-impressionist giants of the turn of the century. Sensing a pattern, Gil asks the men what they think is the greatest era of Parisian culture. Without hesitation, they declare their preference for the artistic high point of the Renaissance. Gil understands that his longing for the 1920’s is neither unique nor rational. Nostalgia regresses infinitely.

As we grow up, we learn about the past – the lives of men and women who lived before us, their art and achievements, and what we inherited from them. But what’s difficult to remain aware of is that for the most part, we’re only given the highlight reel of cultural history. For example, we can’t rent terrible movies from the 1940’s – only the good ones are on DVD. So we’re given the impression that everything filmed in that decade was a glamorous noirish masterpiece, causing film buffs to declare that the movies of today aren’t up to snuff. Similarly, Gil hadn’t read any bad books or seen any mediocre paintings produced by 1920’s Parisians, leading to his obsession with the era.

The inspiration that Gil takes from 1920’s Parisians is good, but his infatuation with the past, personified by his infatuation with Adriana, is harmful. In order to move forward as a writer, he has to face the realities of his life in the present. Once he’s made this realization, he is able to acknowledge that his relationship to Inez is wrong and has to end.

In order to truly learn from history, we have to dig deeper into its more mundane corners. This doesn’t mean we have to throw out the highlight reel – we can and should take inspiration from the great achievements of the past. But this has to be tempered by an acknowledgement of our own tendency to romanticise. Our historic idols were not as different from us as we wish to imagine – they didn’t know they were great yet. In order to be great ourselves, we have to embrace the present moment.

What are your thoughts on Midnight in Paris?