Woody Allen’s 2011 film, Midnight in Paris, focuses mainly on something that is referred to as golden age thinking – the idea that a different time period was much better than the one in which we live. Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), is a struggling American writer who constantly thinks about Paris in the 1920’s and all of the famous intellectuals who lived in the city at the time. In his midnight journeys to such a time, he gets to meet the likes of Ernest Hemmingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Cole Porter, yet by the end of the film, he realizes that where he wants to stay is in the present. When in the 1920’s world that he visits nightly, Gil falls in love with Adriana, a beautiful woman who has relations with many of the famous artists and writers in the film. When conversing with her, we learn that she despises the time in which she lives and wishes she could live in Paris during the Belle Epoque. When they get transported there for a night, they speak with a number of intellectuals who view The Renaissance as the best period in European history. Through all of this, Allen is trying to make the simple point that most people in society don’t recognize how great of a time they live in. Through making this his most conventional film, it seems as though he is working to appreciate and utilize the common film form of our time and not criticize and rebel against it like he has with many of his other films.
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