It’s funny and touching how well a parent knows their child, inside and out. My parents are divorced, but last week, each of them, separately and individually, without consulting with one another (obvs, they’re divorced), called me immediately after leaving the theater from seeing Midnight in Paris, like they walked out and the FIRST thing they did was pick up their phone to call me, and told me I had to see it because I would LOVE IT, –LOVE– it, and that the character was me. They each said it in their own way though. My mom called and said it directly “honey I mean it’s just weird, you’ll see how much you see yourself in him, you have to see it…he’s..he’s YOU.” My dad didn’t tell me directly that Owen Wilson’s character was me, because he likes mystery. He GUSHED about how much I would love the film and had to go see it, but wouldn’t tell me why and said “It’s fantastic–Just go- just go– you’ll know within the first 5 minutes why I’m telling you this.” And sure enough, within 5 minutes into the film, my boyfriend and I literally turned to each other in the movie theater and were like “he’s you…” Well I said ‘he’s me” haha and Alex said “he’s you.”
The character is a writer, who is obsessed with history, and just so excited and passionate about Europe and its magic and charm and the past, and being nostalgic for decades past and just…excited. Excited to explore and learn and read and wander and literally drink up everything he is seeing and feeling and experiencing. His wife just wants to get to the point, and he wants to take midnight strolls, walk in the rain, and think about the past. Like I’m sure a lot of people see themselves in a character like that, but I’m telling you guys, if you don’t know me, the nuances of this character are awkwardly me. Everything he says and does. I mean my mother and father who bore me and raised me called me each to tell me it was uncanny how much this guy was me. It’s so cute, (Owen Wilson did a masterful job) like, every time he turns a corner he is just, exploding with excitement and passion and romantically, insatiably inFATUATED with the past, constantly ruminating to both his wife and himself like, “but just think about it, can you BELIEVE Fitzgerald used to walk these streets? THESE streets that my feet are touching, can you just…think about that?” He can’t over it. He can’t sleep at night because of how excited he is about everything (story of my life). He is a total dork for all of the cliches and Woody Allen plays on it brilliantly for comedy….like the opening montage he is just babbling on and on about how amazing it would/will be to stroll Paris at night, while it rains, with a baguette in hand, in Rachel McAdams is just comically in contrast tohim, being the way mostly everyone else is in life, like “getting wet isn’t fun, Gil….who wants to get rained on?” Haha each character was SO wonderfully cast and directed and gave just…phenomenal performances. Woody Allen is such a fucking genius that it’s sick. It was so FUNNY. Everything about the movie was funny and sweet and poignant and hilarious and just perfect. I adored every millisecond of it, beginning to end.
So if you read my blog and don’t me know, and want to know what I’m like, just see Midnight in Paris. It’s funny too because after I saw it and called my dad up I was like OMG, because I had just written a 3- page blogpost about how incurably obsessed I am with my dad’s past and California in the ’60′s and ’70′s and how I would kill one million puppies to go back and hang out with Vietnam-war-protesting intellectual hippies; and that is what this entire movie is about, is being a romantic/dreamer who is obsessed with golden ages from the past and want their lives to be as richly full of experiences as their fantasy of the past is. I swear the movie started and I was like, laughing, because of how funny it was to see it 2 days after writing that blogpost, because the second they land in Paris, all Owen Wilson can talk about is how he wants to move to Paris and leave everything behind and just live there. Whenever I like a city, I fall so passionately hard for it that I want to move there, like within a week. The amount of times someone in my family or circle-of-friends has heard me say I’m moving to Barcelona, or LA, or NYC, or Paris, is ridiculous. I mean, I will move to those places one day–watch me–but if I travel to a city and like it, it’s always my next home. It was funny to talk to my dad about it too because my dad had to deal with me getting back from Barcelona when I studied/lived there– he picked me up at the airport and he was ready to give me a tranquilizer so I’d shut the F up. I was on crack, just frantically telling him about all of the cities and stories and people and history and how in love I was and how magical everything is and how all I wanted was to go back in time in Barcelona and see what it was like when Orwell lived there after the Spanish Civil War and go back to the turn of the century when Picasso and Dali and Miro all hung out in little artist’s circles at the cafes in Barcelona; and move there tomorrow. And while I was there I would write my parents and friends 10-page word documents about how incredible the sights and feel of the cities were in Rome and Paris and Portugal and Barcelona, like 10 pages just…..flowing in passion onto the keyboard. I mean, I was a History major for a reason. I am obsessed with learning about people’s stories, and the stories of countries, which are really just the collective stories of people (particularly American and European, which is what I concentrated on because it’s just what interests me the most). I am obsessed with writers and poets and artists and musicians; Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Bunuel and T.S. Elliot and Cole Porter; Arthur Miller and Ella Fitzgerald and Kurt Vonngegut and Richard Yates; the artists from each decade in our past. I don’t think anyone who knows me will see Midnight in Paris and not think of me. It’s now in my top 5 of favorite movies of all time, along with Vicky Cristina Barcelona, (tied for number 1 place), Inglorious Basterds, Royal Tenenbaums, and one other I can’t think of.
