Blast from the Past: CRISIS IN SIX SCENES

Woody Allen’s latest production, Crisis in Six Scenes, has his best premise since Midnight in Paris. Set in the late 1960s, the social unrest of the times comes right into the house of a stuck-in-their-ways elderly couple. Their cozy home in upstate New York becomes a refuge for a radical when the daughter of an old friend breaks in. She’s wanted by the government for her membership in a left-wing protest group whose activities include, in addition to the usual demonstrations and rabble rousing, bomb building, cop wounding, and sedition fomenting. The elderly couple wants to help the poor girl out, the more open-minded marriage counselor wife (the wonderful Elaine May in her first role in 16 years) eager to keep her hidden, while the paranoid ad man husband (Allen) descends into a stubborn bundle of helpless nerves as the youthful firebrand (Miley Cyrus) slowly unravels their lives’ predictable patterns. It’s all a great excuse for Allen to explore his usual interest in intermingling relationship tangles with philosophical inquiry.

By far his longest narrative project – clocking in at well over two hours total – it is a six-part miniseries for Amazon. (The shift in form would seem more of a leap if the consistency of his filmmaking over decades – the repetitive themes, recurring character types, the regular font, the usual jazz scores – weren’t already a version of television’s comforting familiarity.) He introduces a large cast of characters with competing loyalties, like the conservative business major (John Magaro) who is smitten by the fetching fugitive, much to the dismay of his debutante fiancé (Rachel Brosnahan). And then there’s a cornucopia of familiar and fun faces as neighbors, patients, parents, cops, and protestors (Becky Ann Baker, Lewis Black, Max Casella, David Harbour, Nina Arianda, Christine Ebersole, Joy Behar, Michael Rapaport, and more). It’s stuffed with personality, but not every character comes to life with as much fullness as the time could permit, like soggy and underdeveloped romantic triangles amongst the younger characters.

There’s also the matter of political rhetoric, for as loaded and provocative as it could be it is instead cozy and comfortable fuzzy hindsight. The prickliest it gets is an early lament about how divisive and polarized the country’s politics are, a wry what-goes-around-comes-around smirk at our circular national crises and our inability to move past them. The great premise is just an excuse to knock contentedly humdrum characters into frazzled situations. I imagine such areas of thinness would be excused if this were a shorter feature. With so much time on his hands, though, there’s simply too much room here for dead air, stiff setups, tone-deaf teasing (a tossed off one-liner about a troubled adopted daughter lands poorly), and lackadaisical reaches for obvious developments. In order to go about stretching this tight little farce over so many segments the plot takes some meandering and the zip in the tension falls slack.

Then there is, of course, the slight stiffness and stodginess that’s crept into Allen’s filmmaking of late, a half-theatrically stilted, half-literary dustbin approach in which exposition is a little too plainly displayed and some zingers come wheezing to the punchline. But even when the writing gets a tad stale, the cast is so energetic and pleasantly amusing, it coasts along on comfortable charms and relaxed charisma. Allen is the quintessential Allen type, May is totally at ease playing the slightly frazzled upper-middle-class pseudo-intellectual (her comfort zone since her Nichols and May days), and Cyrus is just the right young, earnest, half-idealistic/half-cynical goof to send them spinning. Per usual, the right ensemble can carry over slightly below par Allen writing, and this one is overflowing with the exact right casting to elevate the downtimes, the patches that could’ve used another draft or two.

The stage is set for the characters’ conflicts to pile up quite swimmingly, and find occasion in the unevenness for some of the funniest scenes Allen has written in a while. May’s counseling sessions are perfect little sketches, and recurring scenes with her lovable, and increasingly politically rambunctious, little old ladies’ book club are a terrific throughline. Allen and Cyrus spar over food, consumerism, and communist ideals in agreeably prickly wars of words. There’s even a scene in which May scrambles over rooftops after a briefcase of contraband Cuban currency, so this is the sort of story that escalates in sometimes satisfyingly silly and unpredictable ways. Allen has some fun with the historical context, dusting off old quips about Vietnam, hippies, Nixon, Black Panthers, war protestors, and Latin American revolutionaries. (There’s an echo of Bananas there, I suppose.) By the final twenty minutes, which include a sustained and hilarious homage to the Marx brothers’ famous Night at the Opera stateroom sequence, the whole fitfully farcical storyline has arrived at a satisfying crescendo that’s well worth the wait.

Dull Nightlife: CAFÉ SOCIETY

Late period Woody Allen is certainly filmmaking that’ll charm those already predisposed to finding comfort in his rhythms and style – the unwavering font, the American songbook score, the familiar character types, the thematic concerns of a midcentury pop philosopher – and deter those who’ve tired of his tricks (or his personal life). He can still provide a surprise now and then – last year’s Irrational Man was a (probably) self-aware curdling of his tropes; 2011’s Midnight in Paris had lovely French time-travel romanticism – but you mostly know what you’re going to get. Well, you make a new movie a year for over four decades and see how many new topics and techniques you can come up with. So it’s no surprise Café Society, this year’s Allen feature, finds him noodling around with ideas he’s used better before. There are unrequited romantic connections, affairs, insecurities, intellectual posturing, an ambitious and sensitive young Jewish man and his family, and the wistful melancholy of nostalgia. It’s not Allen’s best representation of any of the above, lightly skipping across the surface of places where his writing has other times deepened.

One of his period pieces, it’s told in a brightly artificial simulacrum of New York and Los Angeles of the late 1930s, the better to keep the jazz flowing on the soundtrack and the arch reproduction pseudo-literary stuffiness of the dialogue era-appropriate. Jesse Eisenberg stars as a squirrely young New Yorker who on a whim moves to Hollywood in hopes his uncle (Steve Carell), a high-powered agent, will find him a job in the industry. His mother (Jeannie Berlin) calls ahead and tells her brother to help, but the agent brushes her off. He’s too busy to look after his nephew, but after weeks of waiting relents and puts the eager young man to work running errands. This gets him working closely with a sweet, smart assistant (Kristen Stewart) with whom there’s instant infatuation. Too bad, then, that she has a mysterious unseen boyfriend, a married man whose identity is eventually revealed to be a character we’ve already met. Standard setup, the plot and dialogue are merely going through the motions, but there are some small glimmers of life amidst the artifice.

The early, breezy passages of the movie are a mild warmed-over farce, with characters jostling for attention and obscuring truths. It has low-key charms, but the cast remains posed and situated in the precise, and precisely too-perfect phony, period detail. It looks not like events lived, or situations performed, but games of make-believe staged for our benefit. It’s not a cast; it’s people in costumes. Still, the actors do what they can. Stewart, who unfailingly brings a real sense of grounded presence to the screen, is the highlight. She has a scene where she has to keep feelings hidden while reacting in shock and pain as one lover unknowingly recounts a slight the other shared in secret. The emotion is plain on her face in a twitch of the eyes and a slight shift of the jaw, and yet it is entirely believable that her scene partner wouldn’t notice. A close second for most valuable player is Berlin, grounding a stereotypical Jewish mother role with lived-in conviction. Eisenberg, for his part, plays the Allen-impersonation trap, stammering and twitching, stumbling through wordy lines. And Carell puffs out his chest for a shallow impersonation of an early-Hollywood powerbroker type.

As the film progresses Allen balloons the small, simple, obvious premise into something approaching a sprawling semi-comic family drama. We end up following Eisenberg’s character for several years past the end of the farce, through its fallout and into what’s surely at least a decade of time passing. Threaded throughout are cutaways to Corey Stoll as his two-bit gangster brother who opens a café (and draws in a bunch of high society) while staying a step ahead of the law. (That many of these cutaways are quick gags about gruesome murders is an odd hitch in the otherwise pleasant, even-keel tone.) Other people floating through the supporting cast include a glamorous divorcee (Blake Lively), and a sharply dressed bicoastal power couple (Parker Posey and Paul Schneider). There’s some fun in the mostly intelligent casting, though not every character crackles with the right interest, and not every actor is up to delivering or improving upon what they’re given. Better small pleasures are in the humble glowing cinematography from the legendary Vittorio Storaro (of such beautifully photographed films as The Last Emperor and Apocalypse Now), who captures warm sunny contrasts and, in one striking shot, a luminous, dusky, full-color angle on a bridge that recalls Manhattan’s famous shot.

With a pretty surface exploration of a small variety of relationships, it slowly becomes a melancholy movie about missed connections, about people who’d rather live in denial than face up to the ways they’ve hurt others. And even then the denial slips, leaving them contemplating their choices with regret. That’s a great flicker of life, but embedded in half-thought and underwritten scenes which often seem to grasp for obvious lines and hanging lampshades on thematic points already plainly visible above the subtext. For instance, a character actually trots out the old “an unexamined life…” saying unironically, before putting a spin at the end in a hacking punchline. Like so many of Allen’s lesser works, it’s underwritten. A great performer with a reasonably complicated part like Stewart or Berlin can be lively, dry, funny, and convincing, but smaller roles and lesser actors flounder as the plot and mood slowly peter out. Scene after scene sits flat and tired, jolted occasionally with the sparks of the better movie it could’ve been with another draft or two.

Crimes and Misbehaviors: IRRATIONAL MAN

Once you open the door to a little lie, you live in a world full of reasons to lie. At least that’s a philosophical perspective a depressed professor tries to explain early in Irrational Man, Woody Allen’s latest film. The academic doesn’t really believe it, and that’s not just because he disagrees professionally. He’s not sure he believes in anything at all, having a reached a point of real and deep psychological despair some point before arriving on campus to start his new teaching position during a sunny summer term. At the film’s core is this man’s search for meaning, a solution for his melancholy impotence, creative and otherwise. He finds it not in drinking or flirting with a pretty student, though they’re sickly good stopgaps, but by deciding suddenly and forcefully to commit a perfect crime. He thinks he's smart enough to get away with murder. Once he’s allowed himself to think about it, he’s in a world full of reasons to transgress.

This is hardly the first film from Woody Allen to consider existential crises, the cruelty of mankind, and the cold possibility of evil going unpunished. (See: Crimes and Misdemeanors, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Match Point, and so on.) But in the breezy drama he makes of it this time sits one of its bitterest expressions. Those interested in biographical criticism will surely find it noteworthy to point out that Allen made this film after renewed scrutiny on his personal life and alleged crimes. Irrational Man makes its professor a source of scorn and gossip, who clings to his sense of self-righteous self-justification, and who ultimately must pay for his hubris. If this is to be read as an expression of Allen, it’s a self-loathing statement. But it’s not a poisoned or stunted film. No, he’s up to his usual lively artifice.

Like so much of his recent output, the film plays like a draft, another sketch of ideas and themes he’s obsessively working over, varying the tone and plot, but flowing from a consistent voice. Here he is once more with the American songbook score, white Windsor font credits, and characters cloaked in the brisk patter of stuffy East Coast midcentury pseudo-intellectuals that maybe only ever really existed in this precise manner in the world of Woody Allen movies. Indeed, here the characters are signifiers in an intellectual exercise, but what a fascinating, dryly nasty little work this is. There’s an extra sting to thinly imagined characters as an expert cast enlivens arch wordiness and cinematographer Darius Khondji (in his fourth collaboration with Allen) creates bright tableaus pinning them in. The result is like a frustrated English major turned half-hearted gag writer punched up a minor forgotten Hitchcock concept.

What lets the picture breathe is ultimately the cold jazzy syncopation of dueling narrators, puncturing the depressed professor’s murderous ideas with the naïve beaming lights of a student. What starts as a typical vaguely queasy older man/younger woman relationship is played for its inappropriateness, and is made to seem wrong as a factor in the plot. We meet the man (Joaquin Phoenix, draining potential ticks from the dialogue with a flattened affect) as he arrives on campus just about ready to kill himself. The woman (Emma Stone, as cheerful as ever) is in his class, and responds eagerly to his praise. When they first embrace, Khondji finds them in the reflection of a funhouse mirror. There’s no denying the warped relationship now, especially as the clearly troubled man soon begins secret murder planning and everyone around the woman – her boyfriend (Jamie Blackley), parents (Betsy Aidem and Ethan Phillips), and chemistry teacher (Parker Posey) – advises her to keep her distance.

A key image is the film’s most striking shot. (It may very well be among the best shots in Allen’s career.) Phoenix stands at the end of a pier, the setting sun silhouetting him, reflecting off the water in a way that ripples his form. He looks like a ghostly shadow lurking in the middle of a picturesque landscape. He’s a figure unknowable, and as Stone questions how much she really understands about him, he grows all the more unspeakably creepy. By allowing us access to both character’s thoughts, we’re allowed full knowledge neither have. Their conflict, present even when neither is aware, gains an interesting friction. They arrive at logical conclusions for their situations, the film snapping shut with a clanging moral, neatly deployed. Philosophy in action, or philosophy inaction, leads them to unsettled conclusions, the sort of world-weary worldview of an old man who once thought his intellectual posturing could beat back despair but isn’t so sure anymore. Here’s a film that says the only rational philosophy is one that sees those who damage others fall to dooms of their own making.

Stale Act: MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT

Woody Allen works so quickly that it’s hardly surprising he tends to alternate his more interesting efforts with movies that clearly could’ve used some extra revisions before filming. You don’t make a film a year for over forty years without making a statistically notable batch of stinkers. (There’s your obligatory reference to Allen’s large body of work.) When he’s good, he’s good, but when he’s bad, the movies sit there slowly dying before your eyes. To make a metaphor out of his favorite music style, he’s a jazz virtuoso who has noodled around the same notes for so long, he’d rather hit bum notes than stop. His latest feature, Magic in the Moonlight, is as somnambulant a picture as he’s ever made, a snooze from frame one. It’s easily one of his weakest efforts.

It tells a dusty story of a world-famous magician (Colin Firth) asked by his best friend (Simon McBurney) to help investigate a pretty young psychic (Emma Stone) and her stage mother (Marcia Gay Harden). He fears they are scamming a rich widow (Jacki Weaver) and her grown son (Hamish Linklater) who have fallen for a phony baloney medium act hook, line, and sinker. It’s a fine screwball setup, but it’s played without a pulse, without wit, and completely devoid of inner life. It looks pleasant, filled up with sun-dappled cinematography by Darius Khondji in widescreen compositions showing off sumptuous locations in the south of France. Set in the Jazz Age that was deftly exploited in Midnight in Paris, there’s no magical realism here, just characters in period garb trading the stalest of bon mots.

There’s a dash of Pygmalion in reverse to the proceedings, as a stuffy British gentleman is determined to unmask the young lady’s attempts to pass herself off as something she’s not. In inverting the classic concept, comedy is lost to condescension. It’s not about a man helping a woman, but instead tearing her down and lording his superior position and power over her. (It’s hard to escape thinking of various Allen scandals with such flatly played underlying ugliness.) That there’s a romance involved – not to mention one with such an age difference – makes it all the more difficult to get on board. Firth is a perfect pompous fussbudget and Stone’s wide eyes and flapper’s physique make a fine foil. I especially liked the way she twitched her eyes wider when receiving her “mental vibrations.” But the plot turns so slowly, situations developing without much in the way of conflict or character. There’s nothing to latch onto.

The worst of it is, I can easily imagine a charming period comedy that could be made with this ensemble and crew. It looks wonderful, the ensemble has a talent for crisp comic scenarios, and Allen can be a funny writer. But none of that appears on screen. It’s so thinly developed, with supporting roles fading away and the leads dutifully making their characters’ arcs hit their marks. Allen’s investigation of a skeptic and a scam artist matching wits is tired. The characters can only be as witty as the script allows, so they come across as gullible drips. And every time a character finds something close to genuine emotion, it’s played off with a scoff. If the movie wasn’t going to take itself too seriously, that’s one thing. But to be light and airy without providing a single pleasing development, tickling thematic construct, or interesting turn of phrase is to be nothing at all.

Woman Past the Verge of Nervous Breakdown: BLUE JASMINE

As painful and precise a character study as Woody Allen has ever made, Blue Jasmine is built around an incredible performance by Cate Blanchett. She plays Jasmine, a New York City socialite whose banker husband’s financial malfeasance resulted in a rare prison sentence for him. The legal proceedings wiped out their collective wealth and now she’s stuck living with her working class sister (Sally Hawkins) in a tiny apartment in San Francisco. Allen deftly cuts between flashbacks that swim with ostentatious wealth – palatial vacation homes, richly decorated ballrooms, apartments with wide spaces filled with elegant bric-a-brac – and her daily struggle to survive post-scandal. We hear that some time before the film’s present day she was found alone in the street babbling to herself. Coming out of a flashback, the camera sometimes finds her in the corner of the frame, muttering and mumbling about the events we’ve just seen. As the film slowly fills in the full picture of the downfall of her riches and her husband, it’s clear that this damaged woman so tenuously restarting her life is a woman well past the verge of a nervous breakdown. She’s deep in the midst of it, with only fleeting slivers of hope of making it to the other side.

What we have here is a duet between a master filmmaker and a virtuoso performer. Blanchett is remarkably fragile, broken in deeply neurotic ways that run well past the typical Allen type. Here she’s a woman in the middle of a self-deception. Although she’s broke, has barely a cent to her name, she’s stuck in a wealthy state of mind that keeps her realities from sneaking into her consciousness too deeply. Her husband (Alec Baldwin) was a man who kept her in the dark about his business practices, but she was complicit in that lack of information. She enjoyed the rewards too much. In a potent metaphor for recent economic turmoil, he’s caught in the wrongdoings while she’s the one left to scramble with nothing, not even able to fully process what she’s lost. (Of course, that the legal system actually punished this bad banker is a cinematic fantasy.) In one of the opening scenes, she’s complaining to her sister about the conditions of the first class flight that took her to San Francisco. “I thought you said you were broke,” her sister says. “I am!” Jasmine howls, not seeing the contradictions that sit so plainly on the surface of her narrative.

Allen sees them, though, and the film is unsparing as it watches Jasmine struggle. It’s a film that’s scathing and sympathetic, a contradiction that’s reconciled by the push and pull of the film’s elegantly composed, beautifully filmic cinemascope cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe and the raw emotion storming under and cracking through Jasmine’s barely composed exterior. The film is so cleanly cut, crisply crosscut between past and present. It’s gorgeously blocked, stretching across the frame with care. It’s sharply drawn, surrounding the simple story of a woman trying to find some way to put her life back together with a vividly sketched ensemble of strivers that counterbalance the emptiness of her aspirations and vacuousness of the lifestyle she lost.

Her sister’s surrounded by romantic entanglements old and new, an ex-husband (Andrew Dice Clay), a current boyfriend (Bobby Cannavale), and a maybe-new boyfriend (Louis C.K.). They’re all working class guys who draw the scorn of Jasmine. Their personalities clang against the personalities of the wealthy guys she had grown used to. “You settle for the men you think you deserve,” she snaps to her sister. She, on the other hand, sets her sights on a guy (Peter Sarsgaard) who has eyes on climbing a ladder of social influence. Of course she can’t tell him who she really is. Is it better to be honest with a problematic guy you get to know, or dishonest with a guy who remains unproblematic the less you care to know and care to let him know? The answer seems clear.

But Jasmine could care less if she’s doing the right thing, so long as she thinks she is. She has a need to be correct at all times, or at least a need to be seen as correct. She views every slight, no matter how minor, as a personal affront. Any potential career starter she views as beneath her. She wants the results only and wants them now. Told she has to get a job, she sniffs that the only options for a middle-aged college dropout are “menial.” But she doesn’t see herself and her reality in the terms she entertains just long enough to dismiss. She’s an all-American temporarily disadvantaged millionaire waiting for her ship of money to come in. She simply doesn’t know what to do with herself until then. The film doesn’t know what to do with her either, content to show her to us without much else to balance out the cruelty and emotional damage (to herself and others) following her wherever she goes. Allen is content to serve up this character portrait, vivid and wounded, and leave it at that. It’s as invigorating as it is frustrating, a pained fascination with an uncomfortably complicated character worth turning over in one’s mind long after she’s off the screen and the credits have rolled.

Built in a Day: TO ROME WITH LOVE

To Rome with Love, Woody Allen’s forty-third film, is far too slight to hate outright. It’s a light, whimsical concoction made up of various plotlines following various sets of characters through Rome with no real sense of connection or cohesion. The film’s structure is of mild interest, the postcard-ready cinematography from Darius Khondji is gorgeous, the actors are fine and Allen’s writing is occasionally funny, but the whole enterprise feels so undercooked. Unlike the best of his European films – Vicky Cristina Barcelona, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, and, my favorite of the bunch, Midnight in Paris – there’s no clear reason why the characters, stories or themes within should find themselves set in this particular city. Instead, we’re cycling through a fairly typical series of Allen plots with the lowest amount of charm and dramatic interest necessary to provoke a modicum of my affection in response.

The various plotlines that make up the film are arranged in a dawn-to-dusk structure that opens on the beautiful sunny streets of Rome and ends underneath a sky of twinkling stars, which makes the various timelines of the stories themselves – one takes place over the course of an afternoon, others during few weeks, one over several months – a mildly diverting jumble to keep straight. These plots, the simplest, most gently surrealistic and overtly comic conceits to come from Allen in quite some time, could hardly support a full feature on their own, so it’s good to see that the prolific writer-director has shuffled a handful of half-baked concepts into one film so that we could get them all over with in one underwhelming lump so he and we can move on to better things.

One story in the film follows a pair of native Italians, country newlyweds who arrive in the big city. The wife (Alessandra Mastronardi) gets lost and the husband (Alessandro Tiberi) finds himself mistaken by a prostitute (Penélope Cruz) for her newest client and they’re in the process of arguing when the husband’s family shows up and create a drawn-out case of mistaken identity. The wife ends up stumbling into her own convoluted storyline with mistaken identity and mixed-up romantic signals and so the couple finds their fresh marriage tested in somnambulant screwball scenarios. I couldn’t find this story convincing or effective, although there’s a nice payoff when the husband ends up at a business meeting accompanied by the prostitute and all the business men start sweating bullets upon recognizing the new guy’s companion.

And that’s not even the broadest story in the film. That would be the scenario that finds Roberto Benigni as an average Italian family man who suddenly, inexplicably, becomes famous. He’s hounded everywhere he goes by photographers and reporters, gets invited to fabulous parties and on talk shows, and has beautiful women throwing themselves at them. It’s Allen’s attempt at lampooning those famous for being famous, but the mystery of it all here generates a lack of specificity that stretches too thin for effective satire. A much better comment on celebrity (in a roundabout way) is a storyline starring Allen himself as a retired classical music executive who travels to Rome with his wife (Judy Davis) to meet their daughter (Alison Pill) and her fiancé (Flavio Parenti), as well as their future in-laws. Allen’s delighted to find that the fiancé’s mortician father (Fabio Armiliato) has a great voice for opera, but will only sing in the shower.

All this is mere garnish, however, for the main course of the piece, a somewhat structurally complicated story about a middle-aged architect (Alec Baldwin) who wanders away from his wife’s sightseeing in order to visit the neighborhood in Rome where he spent some post-collegiate years. Once wandering down this memory lane, he meets a young man (Jesse Eisenberg) who recognizes him and invites him to visit his apartment he shares with his girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) and where they are anticipating the arrival of one of her friends from college (Ellen Page). Baldwin lingers around the edges of the scenes that follow, interacting with the characters in ways that make him seem removed from the actual physical, temporal reality of the goings-on. It soon becomes clear (although the film never spells it out) that the young man he met is in fact his younger self. He is literally wandering around, reliving his past. This is the only thread in the film that would almost be enough, with some expansion, to fill up a satisfying feature on its own.

What Woody Allen has here is a collection of scenes and sketches with little reason to be thrown together in this way in this city. But what he does have is a nice sense of commitment to the various conceits of varying realism and broadness, complete and unwavering. And once again Allen proves that he knows good ways to make use of actors, feeding off of their screen personas in ways that make them at once utterly believable in character and completely of a piece within the Allen oeuvre. Of the cast, I’d most like to see Pill, Gerwig, Page, and Eisenberg in a future Allen film. They’re pretty terrific here, finding good ways to perform Allen’s dialogue and scenarios while breathing life into what is ultimately fairly uninvolving lightweight material. 

Anything Goes: MIDNIGHT IN PARIS

Note: Many critics have no problem launching into spoiler territory while discussing this film, but I’ll keep it relatively spoiler free here, discussing themes and plot in such a way as to preserve the surprise of utterly splendid paths the movie takes.

Who could have guessed that the most transporting fantasy of the summer would take place in a film that never really leaves the real world? Woody Allen’s latest, his forty-first film, is Midnight in Paris, a wholly enveloping diversion, a pleasantly layered delight. It presents Paris as a city of real magic with an irresistible draw that pulls in anyone on the right wavelength. I must admit that I fell in love with the city myself while on a school trip last year. It’s a city of such beauty, such fine art, and with a clear, direct sense of connection to times gone by, a city that I felt had always resided in my soul, that I found myself nodding with agreement when a character in the film mentions that Paris just might be the hottest spot in the universe.

Allen opens his film with a dreamy tourist’s gaze. He draws his film slowly and patiently into being with a loving sightseeing montage that looks, really looks, at Paris. It’s plain to see why it’s so easy to fall in love with this city, the cobblestone streets, the stunning architecture, and the extraordinary sights around every corner. It’s also easy to see why a self-proclaimed Hollywood hack like Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) would want to use his visit as the perfect opportunity to buckle down and finish his first novel. His fiancé (Rachel McAdams) and her parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy) would rather zip along on a tight schedule to shop and taste wine. They’re not attuned to the magic of their surroundings. “If I see one more charming bistro…” the fiancé grumbles.

Gil’s not like his future in-laws. He lets the city simmer in his psyche. He knows the place has great magic. He reveres the Paris of the 20’s, a time when American artists of all kinds showed up to create masterpieces, and sees himself, the struggling author that he is, as one of a long, continuous line of talents living, partying, and creating during their time as Parisians. Gil is so inspired that one night he leaves his fiancé and her finicky pseudo-intellectual friends (Michael Sheen and Nina Arianda) behind just to wander the city, to get his creative energy sizzling and buzzing. Paris contains such magic in this film that when a car pulls up and partygoers wave at him and ask him to join them not only does he go along, he finds only ever more to delight and surprise him. When he ends up at a party where everyone is dressed in 20’s garb and a man is playing Cole Porter songs at a piano, why, it only seems natural that he’s fallen immediately into the right crowd.

While his increasingly befuddled family resign themselves to letting him wander off to enjoy himself, he gets to mingle with all manner of Parisians. Wilson plays the part of the yearning nostalgic neurotic artist perfectly with the right blend of anxiety and affability. He comes into contact with all sorts of interesting characters, a gruff, manly writer (Corey Stoll), a socialite (Alison Pill) and her author husband (Tom Hiddleston), a gorgeous fashionable muse (Marion Cotillard), a self-absorbed surrealist (Adrien Brody), and a warm, encouraging editor (Kathy Bates), among many others.

This is a love-drunk fan letter to Paris, literature, and art that makes for a casually dense, parable-like tale that’s a warm rebuke and sentimental smirk to nostalgia and a loving embrace of all that makes us human. Here’s a film that falls in love with a city that forever repays that love. Here’s a film that says artists are human, heroes are flawed, and yet can’t creating and experiencing art be a source of endless joy? One simply can’t live in the past, but isn’t it pretty to think so? To create is to look forwards and backwards at once, a tricky prospect. Here Allen has made a film that seems to do just that for him. It pulls together some of his favorite themes (artists, art, relationships) and passions (literature, jazz, history) and repackages them in ways new and surprising, comforting and familiar.

The beauty of the film is that it can be so thoughtful, philosophical even, and yet so utterly transporting, so completely and utterly entertaining that the outside world melts away for a while. It’s the flat out funniest picture Allen’s made in one or two decades. It’s a grand hug of a film that loves France, loves art, loves love and only grows richer the more you are able to catch the historical references. It’s a sort of romantic comedy, but it succeeds by treating the romance as almost a side-thought. It’s an artful, sweet tourist’s fantasy that succeeds by being so matter-of-fact about its movie magic. What a wonderful film! I practically floated out of the theater with the film resonating so deeply and beautifully, filling me with total joy. Living in the present might not always be so beautiful, so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.