I Travel Through Time: 'First Class', 'Midnight in Paris'

Midnight In Paris

Every critic has their soft spot. Mine has a name; Woody Allen. My almost religious identification with the man's cinematic output razes even the most remote possibility of objectivity. I saw right through Celebrity and Curse of the Jade Scorpion and Scoop, but because of my celluloid alter ego, I found them hugely enjoyable and reviewed them accordingly, despite their obvious faults and the negative critical consensus. So, when I say there's a great new Woody Alllen picture out, I probably sound like the boy who cried wolf, but hey, listen; this one really is great. Allen's been tinkering with pleasant but peripheral little five-finger exercises for the better part of a decade now. Here's an all-out concerto. Midnight In Paris is his most optimistic work, a movie of boundless wit and unforced effulgence that ranks among his all time best. The Woodman Returneth.

The enchanting premise plays like a fairy tale for cultured adults--Gil (Owen Wilson), a hangdog Hollywood hack looking to venture into serious prose, heads to Paris with his hapless fiance, Inez (Rachel McAdams). Tired of passing his nights on the Seine with her pushy parents (Kurt Fuller, Mimi Kennedy) and their grandiloquent wannabe tour guide (Michael Sheen), he wanders the city streets looking for a drink, only to be picked up by a mysterious cabbie who whisks him away to the Gay Paree of the 20's, where Gertrude Stein held court, Hemingway prepared A Moveable Feast, and Picasso played painter and potentate all at once. He meets each and every one of them, along with Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a luminescent muse whom he falls for hard and fast.
While Allen does take the time to play a few cosmic pranks on his artistic ancestors (in his universe, Gil gets Luis Bunuel's career off the ground, and thwarts one of Zelda Fitzgerald's countless suicide attempts), Midnight is really about Gil's journey, and its a pleasure meandering through the Roaring Twenties alongside him--he's one of Allen's deepest, most honest screen creations. He's the token "Woody Allen Character", yes, but he's so much more than that. He represents the hopeless romantic in all of us, and embodies the doubts and delights of just about every modern writer. Allen feels Gil in his bones, and thus gives him really crackling dialogue, smooth as champagne but also twice as biting. Wilson, quietly uncorking heretofore hidden reserves of emotional depth and clarity, relishes every word. He centers the picture, making the experience meaningful and enjoyable even for those who can't tell The Sun Also Rises from New Moon.

I won't deny, though, that it takes on a few extra dimensions for more literate members of the audience. Sly jabs at Cole Porter and Salvador Dali get the gut-busting laughs they deserve, but something else sticks with you; Allen's genuine love of the era he's portraying. He may point out their foibles for a well-earned chuckle here and there, but his deep, deep admiration for them shines through in every frame.

A few rebuttals to the criticisms already being leveled against the picture. No, Inez is not underwritten. It's an unforgiving portrayal, yes, but Gil's flight of fancy wouldn't be so enchanting if there wasn't something extreme for him to flee from. Yes, the final modern-day scenes are highly unrealistic and sudden. This is comedy. The characters get what they deserve, good or bad. And hell no, the real-life figures aren't portrayed with even the slightest sandgrain of accuracy. That would have been all wrong for this movie. They are shamelessly romanticized, exactly as we'd like to remember them. That's what makes this dream world both affecting and addictive.

And in the end, addiction is what Allen is exploring--nostalgia as a drug, as a form of dependency. In the movie's final half-hour, where Gil begins to travel further and further back through time, he comes to realize that the best of times is never now. Escape ceases to be escape when it becomes permanent. This is a message pertinent not just to Gil and people like him, but relevant to the movies themselves. The cinema is a world of wish fulfillment, of dreams coming true. But these dreams should supplement our lives, not define them. While we're on the subject, I must admit that Midnight In Paris was a dream come true for me--a work of truth and beauty and great compassion from my most beloved artist. A.

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X-Men: First Class

That scene is in X-Men: First Class. You know, the kind that needs to be retired from all franchise films for at least a decade. What scene, you ask? Well, let's say there was a really successful superhero picture called Man Who Runs and Jumps Through Hoops N' Stuff. Well, after a couple sequels of steadily decreasing quality, MWRAJTHNS (that would be its acronym) would get a prequel, about how said Man Who Runs and Jumps Through Hoops N' Stuff was once just little Billy from the block. In the final half-hour of said prequel, a supporting character would witness little Billy's ethereal powers and say something to the tune of "You know....they should call you.....(insert pause the size of a Subway footlong)....MAN WHO RUNS AND JUMPS THROUGH HOOPS N' STUFF (heavy percussive music goes here.)" I can count on one hand the number of prequels in which this gambit has worked. Casino Royale. There. I've counted.

Ok. I'm putting away the snarkiness. This film deserves my scrutiny, yes, but not my venom. It doesn't insult my intelligence. It doesn't truly waste my time. It isn't lugubrious or self-important. It sincerely tries to entertain. At times it does. If this sounds like faint praise, it is; here's a movie that never crashes and burns, but doesn't quite get off the ground, either. It just sort of hovers there, like Banshee in his first attempt at flight.

Banshee, you ask? He's one of the young superhumans who joins a hastily assembled, CIA-backed team of mutants led by a young Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) and his best friend/future arch-nemesis, Erik Lensherr (Michael Fassbender). Their stated mission: avert the Cuban Missile Crisis. But carefully concealed modus operandiabound; Xavier's undertakes the mission as a gesture of goodwill from mutants to their homo sapien counterparts, and Erik is out for blood; Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), former Nazi and murderer of Erik's beloved mother, is the brains behind the current crisis.

A globe-trotting superhero revenge pic is an inspired concept, and flashing back to examine the trials and triumphs of the first generation of mutants isn't a bad idea either--at this stage in its life, the franchise could use a rejuvenated sense of discovery. What's disappointing is how little director Matthew Vaughn does with the idea. I really would've loved it if the picture had a From Russia With Love vibe, with the mutants using their respective powers to engage in some down-to-the-wire-international espionage. Instead, we are treated to a truly bizarre vision of superheroes in the swingin' fifties and sixties-X-Men meets Don Draper. This is certainly the only comic-book adaptation ever to feature a pit-stop in Wayne Newton-era Vegas and the line "That's a really groovy mutation." The second half of the picture mercifully cuts down on the cheap nostalgia, but it also damn near does away with the entire period-superhero-picture concept. The X-Men spend a total of maybe five minutes averting an international crisis; they waste the rest of the last half-hour shooting big balls of energy at each other and flying in circles, actions that would have the same effect in any other decade. "X-Men goes 007" is a fantastic starting point, but the final result is shockingly subpar.

With one exception; Fassbender's Erik/Magneto. Fassbender portrays his avenging anti-hero as a figure of Shakespearean sound and fury, and rightly so; Magneto is one of the most complex figures in comic book literature, a man whose evil streak is borne not of a disposition to cruelty but of an unstinting belief in the overall weakness of good. His quest for vengeance provides most of the movie's honest thrills, and I kept wishing that First Class was his story and his alone.

'There's hope for the sequel' is perhaps the best complement I can pay this shaky first installment. It assembles a uniformly excellent cast in the service of a risky conceit---one so risky it seems even the filmmakers were afraid of it. If they would just trust their vision a little, this birth-of-the-hero-at-the-turn-of-the-century idea would soar. It's my sincere hope that this First Class comes back for a reunion and shows us what they've learned since their first go-round. C+.