Peripatetic in old age, Woody Allen has made a romantic comedy Europe’s most fabled romantic city. But it’s the past, specifically the 1920s, that Gil (Owen Wilson) romanticizes. Engaged to a modern girl (Rachel McAdams), he’s writing a novel about a nostalgia shop, hoping to wean himself from his lucrative Hollywood screenwriting career. But his vacation becomes a very literal nostalgia trip when he’s transported, again literally, to the era of Cole Porter, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. Porter’s performance (or that of the actor playing Porter) of his own composition “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love” and other clues suggest that it is 1929.
Despite the highbrow trappings, what this is really like is Woody’s version of all of those body-switching comedies that appear every so often. Gil stays in the same body, but experiences a different time. He learns, more or less, the same lessons, though. Of course, it helps to enjoy the movie if you have any affinity for the famous figures of old, and particularly if you can remember such slightly lesser lights as the filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Woody doesn’t work hard to set up the premise, and I have no idea how authentic the portrayals are. It doesn’t matter; they’re just there to be amusing celebrities, like all of the folks Tom Hanks runs into in Forrest Gump.
Forrest Gump had an emotional arc to it too, though, whereas this stays strictly on the light side. It is far less deep than Hanks’s own body-switching comedy, Big. It succeeds by virtue of a cute premise, not the paint-by-numbers execution of the premise. Even before Gil meets a sweet 1920s artist “groupie” played by Marion Cotillard—Gil’s use of the term “groupie” confuses her— it’s obvious that he and the fiancée are a lousy couple. Gil himself is an amalgamation of the ornery characters Allen used to play and the boyish ones Wilson usually does. Otherwise Allen sticks with the sort of upper-middle-class and wealthy, sometimes pompous, intellectual characters who populate most of his recent films. Allen does do one clever thing with the time-travel premise. He nicely indulges his love of early jazz in the soundtrack. And he lovingly depicts the city of Paris, especially lovely, as Gil would argue, in the rain, notably in a long, loving montage that sets the mood during the opening credits. Classy fluff, this one.
viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 6/22/11
No comments:
Post a Comment