Midnight in Paris (Woody Allen, 2011)

The opening shots of Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris show the titular city from the perspective of a tourist, focusing on landmarks as tour groups walk and ride ferries around town. Occasionally, he spares brief glimpses of back alleys occupied by locals who know how to avoid the shuffling guests. Meanwhile, Allen lays French-flavored jazz, a Parisien take on American music, over such shots. He even literalizes the other part of the title by spreading the montage over the course of a day from sunrise to starless night, watching the blossom of the City of Light as dim interior lights grow into the full dazzle of Paris after dark. Despite the simplicity of Allen's static montage, he conveys a number of important ideas with the first moments: we do not see the Paris of those who live there but of tourists who visit it, and the sight of centuries-old landmarks looming over modern urban bustle shows the past mingling with the present.

That juxtaposition magnifies as Allen follows Gil (Owen Wilson), a successful hack screenwriter who looks to Paris for inspiration for his novel. Drunkenly wandering Paris one night while his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) dances with friends, Gil suddenly finds himself sucked into an old car after midnight, ending up amongst flappers, ex-pats and, most importantly, a host of legendary artists who dwelt in the city in the 1920s.

It's the dream of any creatively aspiring person, the chance to hang out with Hemingway or the Fitzgeralds, to get a book proofread by Gertrude Stein or judge a painting by Picasso. For Gil, whose book concerns a man running a nostalgia shop, the chance to walk around the past and interact with it is so wonderful only someone as capable of pure glee as Owen Wilson could pull it off.

Wilson gets a lot of flak, but I like him and can think of few other actors better suited to the role of Gil. Wilson has a voice that manages to convey simultaneous doe-eyed innocence and arrogant smarm, perfect for the insecure but ambitious writer. Gil walks around Paris, in both the modern day and the '20s, with a look of childlike wonder and joy on his face, but he's also cynical about his talents and bitterly antagonistic to Paul (Michael Sheen), Inez's uncomfortably close male friend and an officious fool who impresses others with his pontifications even after someone points out he's actually wrong about Rodin's mistress or the names of artists who designed and decorated Versailles.

Paul's insufferable lectures, all of which revolve around obvious tourist traps despite his image of being at one with French culture, sap all the fun from Paris, and even if Gil didn't get to walk around with the Lost Generation, one can hardly blame him for ducking away to the streets to avoid the man.

In a summer already marked by nostalgia in the form of Super 8 and, indirectly, the historical appropriations of X-Men: First Class and, soon, Captain America*, Allen's film is bizarrely attuned to the current mood. To be sure, it's undeniable he has his own fun with past literary and artistic figures. Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) speaks the way the author's prose reads: brutal, aggressive, restless. Stoll looks like he dabbed absinthe on his neck as makeshift cologne, and when he screams, "WHO WANTS TO FIGHT?!" I can't imagine what clueless fool would take him up on it. Kathy Bates amusingly plays Gertrude Stein as a sort of Mother Goose for the artistic community in Paris, coaching the artists but also comforting them when mistresses leave.

After a time, I started registering the historical figure before the actor. Before Adrien Brody even said a word, before I even recognized him, I thought "There's Dali!" Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill nail F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hiddleston conveying the pain of his wife's tumult vying with his undying love for her and Pill communicating Zelda's schizophrenia long before it manifests. I kept waiting for the terrible impression to come along, the inevitable clunker of a performance that befalls all films where a cast has to deal with a huge number of real and significant figures. I kept waiting for the Condoleeza Rice from W. or the Churchill from The King's Speech. But Allen cast this movie impeccably: not only does everyone fit the part (almost uncannily so) but they all try to genuinely sound and act like some aspect of that person.

Yet the most catching character in the film is a mistress by the name of Adriana, forgotten by time but inspiring to a number of painters who changed that medium's landscape. From the moment the camera first settles on Marion Cotillard, she feels more like a muse than anyone to appear in a Woody Allen film, even Diane Keaton. That's not to say she's better, of course, but the camera almost physically reacts whenever she's on-screen. The frame seems to stop cold when she comes into it, frozen in first-sight love and intimidation of her beauty. It's like Allen is constantly surprised to run into her, conveying his trademark fluster through the lens as the camera tries to breathlessly apologize for stumbling upon her. And when she good-naturedly smiles at this flushed infatuation, the camera nearly swoons as if about to pass out. Cotillard could almost get away with saying nothing at all, but thank God she does, and her performance mingles so well with her presence that when the film begins to turn around her axis, the shift does not feel so seismic.

Adriana's own infatuation with a past time, La Belle Époque, brings out a more serious idea for Allen's whimsical tour of Paris past and present. He delights in roaming among artistic figures and even has fun with them—Gil pitches Luis Buñuel on The Exterminating Angel, only for the surrealist to be wholly unable to grasp why people couldn't leave a room—but he slowly brings out the idea that everyone pines for a Golden Age that is hardly considered such by those who lived in that time. One of the few insightful things Paul says, albeit condescendingly, is "Nostalgia is denial, denial of the painful present." Gil gradually comes to realize this, remarking to Adriana, "Maybe the present is a little unsatisfying because life is a little unsatisfying."

As such, Midnight in Paris ultimately critiques the wave of nostalgia floating through recent films, and even Allen's own The Purple Rose of Cairo. Gags of the past bleeding into present and vice-versa (would things have been different for Scott and Zelda if she'd been able to procure Valium?) offer visible comedy to go with the bouncing, witty script. At last, however, Allen comes to the conclusion that choosing to live in an idealized vision of someone else's existence is a hollow alternative to making one's own present into the best it can possibly be. There are suggestions of Allen identifying with Gil, who feels screenwriting is a lesser talent and yearns to be considered a literary talent, but Allen at last seems to be lightening up about his lot, and it shows in this film. Inez and her family are thinly written Republican caricatures, but Allen just wants an uncomplicated laugh. (Besides, who can afford to vacation in France these days except Hollywood liberals and conservative businessmen insulated against the economy?) I would still have liked more dimension in Inez and her family, however; at a certain point, the caricatures border on the sexist.

Nevertheless, it's the sober, positive conclusion the dour Allen comes to through the comedy and whimsy that makes Midnight in Paris truly deserving of the hype it's received. While this line may be tossed out with each new Allen feature, the film may rank someday among the director's finest. How strange it is that Allen, once one of those directors synonymous with a city, has achieved his greatest success in old age as a transient, his finest late-career work always forcing him out of his comfort zone. But then, at times he seems a better fit for Europe than even his dear Manhattan.


*Even, to an extent, The Tree of Life operates through nostalgia for a time period and setting that is not that of most of its audience.

Tron: Legacy

The modest but devoted fanbase for Tron alleges the 1982 film was ahead of its time, referring to its extensive and pioneering use of computer-generated imagery. Unfortunately, one could not say that its sequel, Tron: Legacy, is even of its time. Caught between presenting an updated version of Tron's computer world that better reflects the compounded evolution of digital technology or simply wallowing in the dated vision of futuristic cyberspace interaction offered by the original, director Joseph Kosinski opts for the latter and cements the insular pointlessness of the whole exercise. The Lawnmower Man has more to say about the possibilities of cyberspace.

Tron: Legacy opens with swooping, animated crane shot that plunges the film into the Uncanny Silicon Valley, where an artificially young Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges, who spends half the film creepily animated) talks about his creation with 11-year-old son Sam (Garrett Hedlund in the boy's adult years). Flynn promises to take Sam with him to the Grid the next day, but he never comes home after leaving that night in 1989. Twenty years later, Sam abandons his father's company, profiting as the principal shareholder but spending most of his time slyly undermining the profit-driven number-crunchers who took over for the more idealistic Flynn. When Kevin's old partner (Bruce Boxleitner) gets a page -- yes, a page -- from Flynn's old office in his abandoned arcade, Sam heads there in the faint hope that his father might finally have returned from wherever he went. He discovers a hidden room with a strange device attached to a computer, and, well, you know the rest.

Inside the grid, so little has changed that one might assume Kosinski feels the biggest advancement in design over the last 30 years has been rounded corners. Where light cycles once traveled in straight lines, now they curve, and that's about it. Tron: Legacy might as well have been a reboot than a sequel, doing nothing more than updating the famed graphics of the original. (That is the double-edged sword of special effects pioneering: great stories live on forever, but effects are always being outdone. George Lucas has alienated nearly his entire fanbase by grappling with that problem.)

Kosinski's vision hedges closely to Steven Lisberger's, using neon chiaroscuro of plunging blacks offset by bright, pale blues and throbbing oranges set against a pixellated world. The souped-up visuals sure do look incandescent, including a few moments here and there that make good use of that most unnecessary of gimmicks, 3-D (though I can think of no better story to be told in 3-D than that of a film that likewise concerns stagnation and horizontal, not vertical, development of technology). Without resorting to a barrage of quick cuts, Kosinski manages to craft sequences of pulsating frenzy, as the colors bleed and swirl until downed programs dissolve and shatter into pixels. But it gets old so damn fast, a repetitious blend of blue and orange that dips into a sad nadir with a fight in a club that dovetails into absurd, cringeworthy cutaways to Michael Sheen hamming it up as a Bowie-esque club owner who contorts his face and body into odd configurations as if the director included only the shots of Sheen horsing around on-set. (The cutaways are a problem in general, such as a strange close-up on Sam's dog early on and a few awkwardly inserted fluff scenes that break the flow for no reason.)

If the original Tron suffered from a lack of narrative momentum, its successor is overloaded with a surfeit of plot. Discontent to simply give the audience what it wants -- mindless, sparkling action -- Kosinski and his writers, Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis, insist on forcing some kind of emotional connection by taking the most outlandish, shameless approach possible to wring a mass reaction without a personal bedrock.* Flynn never returned from his visit to the Grid 20 years previously because the program he created to fashion the perfect digital world, Clu (Bridges with the digitally young face), naturally turned on its maker, and it also set about destroying a new type of program spontaneously created by the system. "It was genocide," solemnly sighs the aged Kevin when he fills his son in on the gaps. Every fiber of my being wanted to shout, "No it goddamn wasn't." Aware that Clu could use his identity disc to break into the real world -- don't even ask -- Flynn hid out for 20 years with the last remaining isomorphic program, Quorra (Olivia Wilde), attaining a Zen-like calm that offsets the severity of the Holocaust allegory with a Dude-esque performance. "Biodigital jazz, man," Kevin unhelpfully says when describing the isomorphic algorithms, his vague, hippie speech tragically serving as the logical foundation of the film's plot.

Meanwhile, Bridges' performance as Clu may be the first time I have completely failed to buy the greatest living American actor in a role. Part of this can be explained by that damn uncanny valley he has to carry on his face the entire time like a digital albatross, forcing all attention away from one of the best faces in the biz onto the horrid, plastic stiffness of the cheek muscles (this crime is particularly egregious, as few smile like Jeff Bridges; see the ones he gives with his proper features as Flynn for proof). But he is also forced to act essentially as a Hitler substitute, obsessed with purification and perfection under his rule. Bridges has been a capable and believable villain before, but Hitler? That aggression will not stand, man.

I found the anti-corporate attitude of the first Tron a bit on-the-nose but refreshingly cheeky. It is not inherently hypocritical for big budget movies to resent a capitalist attitude, and the first Tron cared enough about advancing the medium to give its idealism a certain pluck. But the lazy application of that same philosophy here seems nothing more than a cynical appropriation of elements of the first film without a moment's thought for context. Tron: Legacy is one of the most transparently for-the-franchise movies I've ever seen, something that exists solely to cash in on nostalgia and sell a new crop of toys and video games. The film even makes itself willfully irrelevant to better ensure it doesn't rock the franchise boat.

I would have liked to see a modified vision of cyberspace, one in which the power is now disseminated among millions of users instead of a single mastermind. But Tron: Legacy has nothing to offer. It does not even work as a mildly experimental music video for Daft Punk, whose soundtrack is a notable step down from the inventiveness of their usual work, a driving but soulless buzz of squall that serves as the de facto plot momentum given how leaden the actual structure is. Having listened to the soundtrack before seeing the movie, I can say that the above-average electronica works much better in the context of the film, but it too is a disappointment.

If anything, the grid animated through modern graphics is less imaginative than the one rendered on early animating computers. The programs tend to just act like people, as if the filmmakers realized that any real focus on the aspect of a machine's "soul" would raise too many philosophical questions that would limit box office appeal and steamrolled over the subject. And where and how is there food inside the computer world for Flynn to eat? Proving the point that this movie is about nostalgia, nearly all the plot is delivered through flashbacks and reminiscences, as if we're watching the third planned film in the series after the original idea for the darker middle movie fell through during production, leaving enough completed scenes for recycling.

Tron: Legacy is a hollow, clanging piece of capitalist opportunism, a spectacle that wears out its welcome for the rigid repetition of the grid's stunted possibilities. That, in a nutshell, is the film's chief failing: even after nearly 30 years of rapidly accelerated technological advancement, computers still offer the same vastness of potential for growth. If only anyone involved cared about showing that instead of making a $170 million video of a middle-aged person finding and playing with his childhood toys. A single shot in Tron: Legacy fully caught my eye: as Quorra and Sam sit at the front of a transport ship, a POV shot of Kevin looking at them from the far end temporarily overcomes the shallow focus of 3-D and pulls the two characters out of the screen from a the middle plane of a long shot and communicates for a few seconds the kind of possibility and forward-thinking vision of user-program harmony the rest of the film brushes aside for its empty regression. What a tantalizing and frustratingly teasing three seconds they are.


*Cheap emotional manipulation without sincere character development? Wait, let me check...yep, Horowitz and Kitsis were Lost writers. Of course.