I’ve been trying to talk myself into going to this film for a while now. Today I went because there’s nothing new in the theaters this weekend that I want to see.
I didn’t want to go, because, you know, Woody Allen and all that. I can’t get over that little moral glitch where he marries Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter with Andrew Previn. I mean, really, do you get to do this, even in New York?
Also, I’m not an Owen Wilson fan, unless you count Lightning McQueen.
(Owen Wilson and Woody Allen are having a drink. One says to the other, “I’m really not a Hambrick fan. I can’t get over her pathetically mediocre writing,” and the other replies, “It’s the church hopping that really fries me. Those poor kids.”)
The fact is, Brian and I had taken the boys to Huntington Beach, and say what you want, taking two boys to the beach is not a vacation. It’s an exhausting week of continual adolescent management, except for the bits where you’re riding waves, see my post on that (under the Thoughts tab above). So, now that we’re back home, we had to get out and see a movie, and in the moment, my desire to see real art overrode my personal non-fan-ism.
The story: Gil (Owen Wilson) and Inez (Rachel McAdams) are engaged and in Paris. With her parents. Who don’t like him, and think he’s flighty. He is. He’s suffering from “it was better back then,” which is a sort of national American disease, best illustrated by Tom Brokaw’s insufferable insistence on the WWII generation as “The Greatest,” an insult to everyone from the long-dead Founders to the newly-dead Fallen and every injured, killed, sacrificed-to-oil GI Joe and Jane in between. (Liberte, Egalite, Petrol-ite!)
Whatever about that. Paris 2010 entraces Gil, lures him into her midnight self. Paris 1920, he thinks, would be even better. He wants to live there. He wants to be part of Paris-as-it-used-to-be and happily, he gets the chance. All kinds of exciting adventures happen, but I’m not going to ruin it for you by telling you what they are. Who they are is Marion Cotillard, lovely as always. (If you haven’t seen her in La Vie en Rose, you have missed out.)
I laughed out loud. A lot. Some of that might have been the simple giddiness of being out of the house alone with Brian after a week cooped up with two 12-year-olds, but still. I’m hypercritical about movies, as you know, and this one made me laugh.
I’m not a fan of Kathy Bates, either. She’s like the patron saint of plain, fat, middle-aged women, meaning, I should probably be invoking her blessing, but I don’t like her, because she’s plain, fat, and middle-aged, and when I go to the movies, I want to see beautiful people in lovely clothes who don’t speak as if they spent their childhood saying, “Trailer trash,” when asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. (She needs to insist on better roles, is all I’m saying. Who wants to be typecast like she is? It’s insulting. She should insist on classier roles. Take Judi Dench to lunch and learn a thing or two.)
There are a lot of pretty people and clothes in this movie. But Paris is the real beauty, and she bedazzles. I kept mentally reaching for my passport, may Monsieur Mantzke forgive me for forgetting every single conjugation, every single mot, except I think I can still sing Sur le pont, d’Avignon, which just goes to show you that things you sing last longer. (All my students are probably haunted by those twin horrors: The Presidents’ Song and The State Song, not to mention Goober Peas and, in later years, The Greek Alphabet Rap, which goes like this: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon [and so on]—but of course, you have to be there for it to be interesting and non-forgettable.)
Go see this movie. It’s real art and it’s delightful. Full of delicious references and classic Allen socially-awkward scenes. Owen Wilson plays Woody Allen playing Gil, and it’s just fun to watch him.