Owen Wilson turns out to be the best Woody Allen surrogate by far in the Woodman’s “Midnight in Paris,” a lightly amusing fantasy about a hack screenwriter who gets to hobnob with artistic legends in the City of Light of the 1920s.
This riff on one of Woody’s long-ago short stories sounds like it might be his most ambitious movie in years, but in truth it doesn’t come close to fully exploring the comic possibilities of the premise.
While it might not be anywhere near as inspired as “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” it’s entirely possible to enjoy what I’d rank as his second best this century (ahead of the highly overrated and self-important “Match Point”), if you approach it with modest expectations.
Wilson’s character is visiting Paris with his crass girlfriend (Rachel McAdams) and her parents (the father is described as a “Tea Party Republican” in the film’s sole topical reference).
The girlfriend is annoyed at Wilson’s desire to stay on in Paris to soak up inspiration for a “literary” novel he’s writing about a man who works in a nostalgia shop. She wants him to instead cash in with paycheck jobs while he’s still hot in Hollywood.
Walking the cobblestone streets one midnight, Wilson is beckoned into an antique car and whisked to a party with flappers and men in formal dress. As Cole Porter sings at the piano, he’s astounded to find himself chatting with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
Through means that Allen never spells out and Wilson never much questions, our hero is able to return to his beloved ’20s every midnight.
On his second visit, he’s taken to the salon of Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), who gives wise counsel on his novel. She also introduces him to a young woman (Marion Cotillard) who has been serving as a serial mistress to major artists (currently Picasso).
The two quickly fall in love, though, sadly, Cotillard and Wilson have no chemistry together whatsoever — and it turns out that Cotillard finds the 20s “boring” and is herself nostalgic . . . for the 1890s.
Wilson is a vast improvement over such dubious ersatz Woodys as Edward Norton (“Everyone Says I Love You,” also set in Paris) Kenneth Branagh, Will Ferrell and John Cusack.
In his best performance since “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Wilson wraps his Texan drawl around Woody’s one-liners and delivers even the wheeziest of them with panache.
It’s pretty hard not to grin when he offers the troubled Zelda a Valium, though the writer-director resolutely refuses to consider the possibility that Wilson might be altering the time-space continuum.
Besides Wilson and Bates, the only actor who manages to get past a one-note caricature is Adrien Brody, in a hilarious unbilled cameo as Salvador Dali.
McAdams and Michael Sheen (“The Queen”), as her pompous art-professor ex-boyfriend, have truly thankless roles. French star Lea Seydoux turns up briefly as a charming art peddler, while French First Lady Carla Bruni has a superfluous cameo as a tour guide.
Though it never ventures past the tourist quarters of Paris, this is one of Woody’s most handsomely photographed movies.
A quarter-century ago, his thematically similar “The Purple Rose of Cairo” found genuine emotion in its fantasy world. The earlier film was a lustrous oil painting compared to a glib charcoal sketch like “Midnight in Paris.”