Here is a familiar story: a young hero abruptly leaves his normal life to go on an adventure of discovery, or self-discovery, or escape. This journey could transform the world around the hero or send the hero to an alternate fantasy land that mirrors our own. And, in the end, it's all a dream...but maybe real, at the same time. We've seen that ending time and again: reality asserts itself, but with a wink and a nod the film plants a seed of doubt. Inception ends on a wobbling top. Pan's Labyrinth blurs the line between the fantasy world and our own.
Midnight in Paris is nothing like those films, though it seems to be at first.
Woody Allen wrote a delightful romance in Midnight in Paris by doing something very simple: avoiding the storytelling tropes we naturally expect. Midnight in Paris is about love, but it's not a love story. It's wrapped within a heartwarming aura of magical realism but avoids the genre's tendency for introspection.
Just a word of warning: there be plot spoilers ahead!
Owen Wilson plays Gil, a Hollywood writer who loves his fiancee almost as much as the city of Paris. He loves the streets, the rain, the restaurants, the people. He's enraptured. Paris is perfect. Gil's impassioned monologues about Paris lend the city an air of fantasy, like a high school sweetheart transformed into a lost soulmate by the passage of time and rosy tint of nostalgia.
After a subdued opening that establishes Gil as a nostalgic dreamer, Midnight in Paris quite suddenly transitions into the realm of magical realism. Gil travels back in time.
Magical realism blends the fantastic with what we know to be real. In film, magical realism often manifests in the form of impossible things happening to normal people. Harold Crick finds himself the protagonist of a novel in Stranger Than Fiction. Twin Peaks uses magical realism to establish a mysterious, hyper-surreal setting. The genre spans literature and film and takes many different forms, but this definition best gets to the heart of what magical realism can accomplish as a storytelling technique:
It is a fusion between scientific physical reality and psychological human reality. It incorporates aspects of human existence such as thoughts, emotions, dreams, cultural mythologies and imagination. Through this amalgamation, magic realism can be more exact in depicting human reality.
All of this becomes important the moment Gil steps into an old-fashioned automobile at the stroke of midnight and finds himself delivered to a party in the Roaring Twenties. Socialites Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald happily tour Gil from one happening joint to the next. Gil loves it; he gets to live in the decade of prolific artistic creativity he so nostalgically pines for. And after a chat with none other than Ernest Hemmingway, Gil wanders back onto the streets and returns to his own time.
Was it all a dream? An allegory for Gil's inner conflict? That question would become the driving force behind most works of magical realism, or at least a lurking mystery always dangling just out of reach. When a film is fully immersed in magical realism--when fantasy elements are present from the very beginning--characters often accept their environment at face value because that's how the fictional world has been constructed. But when magical realism is introduced midway, injected into a previously normal world, we expect characters to react and question. We expect the film to acknowledge that what's going on is pretty weird, and most writers delight in leaving the mental state of the protagonist ambiguous.
Woody Allen provides an answer within ten minutes. Gil goes back in time. Period.
This is what makes Midnight in Paris so charming: it unquestioningly embraces the impossibilities of magical realism, using them to explore Gil's character, and tosses aside any attempt to distinguish between fantasy and reality. From a narrative perspective, magical realism becomes pure realism. Allen devotes exactly two scenes to the natural skepticism surrounding time travel, then allows Gil to accept what he's found and live in the moment. And there's not even a chance Gil's meant to be an unreliable narrator, dreaming up all of his Parisian adventures: he isn't the only one to take a stroll into the past.
Gil harbors a deep, aching nostalgia for the Paris of the past, and magical realism allows Woody Allen to bring that nostalgia into the frame and study it from all sides. Would Gil truly be happier living in the past? In the end Midnight in Paris leaves us with two seemingly conflicting ideas. Nostalgia is a natural feeling that we all must learn to accept and move on from, yet there are still happy endings out there for even the dreamiest of dreamers.
Gil has the chance to befriends his heroes...but gradually comes to realize that the magic is in Paris itself, not the luminaries of the 1920s. The city he loves changes relatively little in 90 years. There's romance in Paris no matter the century, and you don't even need a magic automobile ride to find it.
