Midnight in Paris

The new picture written and directed by Woody Allen is a special kind of delight. It’s a love letter to the City of Light, it’s a frisky little foray into “golden age” nostalgia and literary time travel. Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is a struggling young writer vacationing in Paris with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and her haughtily patrician parents. The uncertainties in that set of relationships are already mounting when Gil, left briefly to his own devices, finds himself transported, every night at the stroke of 12, into the Paris of the 1920s and the company of writers and artists of the Lost Generation. What ensues is a charmingly bittersweet mixture of romantic comedy and farcical literary fantasy. Pender’s whimsical nocturnal adventures among the denizens of the Paris avant-garde get particular heft from boldly realized versions of Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Pablo Picasso (a mostly silent Marcial Di Fonzo Bo), and Salvador Dalí (Adrien Brody). And Gil’s romantic travails get both complicated and clarified by his nocturnal dalliances with an adventurous Paris flapper named Adriana (an excellent Marion Cotillard). Pageant Theatre. Rated PG-13