Bishop Barron on Woody Allen's "Midnight In Paris"

when I was a doctoral student in Paris back in the late 1980s and early 1990s I used to occasionally sort of fantasize about the Paris of the 13th century when my hero Thomas Aquinas was living and working in Paris when Notre Dame was being completed and when the sand Chapelle was being built and I would say what a golden age that must have been and of course at the time I was in Paris you know when the high culture was was characterized by a lot of skepticism and all that sort of bland and bored modernism there was something wonderful about this time when high intellectual achievement you know and the faith came together so I guess I could be excused for hankering after a little bit but Woody Allen's new movie Midnight in Paris is the kind of affectionate mocking of just this tendency to look back at the past as a golden age and therefore a refusal to live dramatically in the present his movie centers around a fellow named Gil Pender who's a writer of kind of third-rate Hollywood movies who longs to write a great novel like those of F scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein his literary heroes the movie opens and dill is in Paris with his fiancee and her parents and they're making the rounds of Paris but he's much less taken by modern Paris and he's sort of hankering after the Roaring Twenties when his great heroes were striding the stage in the city of lights well one night he's just kind of wandering alone through Paris and he's kind of bored he's unhappy he reclines on a little set of stairs and then he sees this automobile from the 1920s coming up the road people gesture from it they beckon to him to come in and he's puzzled you know but he says well okay I'll join them he joins them and there they are in the outfits of the 1920s and they take him to a party he sees all these people you know in the music going on and over to him comes a woman who says hi I'm I'm Zelda and then her husband comes over he goes hi I'm Scott Fitzgerald so he loves its jokes a costume party or something's going on and then he sees this fellow at the piano singing a Cole Porter song it's Cole Porter and then in comes this dashing young man with a black mustache and they all calm Hemingway and so he realizes he's entered some kind of weird time warp and he's actually in the Paris of the 1920s well he's captivated by all these people he goes back three or four times and he meets beside the ones I mentioned almost all the major players of that time all the great artists and writers and so on he meets Picasso he meets Gertrude Stein he meets a man ray he meets dolly he meets TS Eliot and the kind of a joke of the movie is that all these people that he runs into act and speak perfectly according to type so was Hemingway speak is really funny anyone that's read Hemingway he speaks in that kind of clear chiseled you know crystalline prose of his novel he's also always spoiling for a fight you know he wants a boxing match with somebody Picasso is all you know stormy intensity Gertrude Stein is you know the mother hen of all these writers and artists dolly he meets and dolly is all weird and intense just as you'd expect him to be they all act according to type and at first I must say when I was watching I thought is this kind of cartoonish is he painting the past and all these primary colors then I started caught on what he's doing is mocking our tendency to look back at the past in this very idealized way to see just these you know grand archetypes there's a wonderful joke in the movie because he meets a young woman who's a mistress of Picasso she'd also been a consort of Modigliani and Braque you know I mean why not she knew all these people and Gil and she become friends it becomes clear those he is just singing the praises of this wonderful time all these great people and he's meeting and aren't they wonderful she's like I well yeah she knows picasso and she knew brock and but she oh the the wonderful time was the paris of the Belle Epoque you know the late 19th century that's the time because what are you talking about it's the 1920s she's well 1920s it was her present time so it was uninteresting at one point there's a kind of dream within a dream sequence when a beautiful horse-drawn carriage from that period comes up and then Gil and the girlfriend get in the carriage which then takes them back to the ballet puck and they meet to lose the track and Goga and take on all her heroes you know so she's thrilled by that but then go again and and and a god are talking about the Renaissance how wonderful was back in the Renaissance time at which point Gill kind of gets the meaning and we all with him get the meaning of the story that we have this tendency not to live in the present but always to romanticize a time in the distant past and we tend to live there seen here I think Woody Allen is making common cause with many of the great spiritual masters you'll see it in the great spirit Christian spiritual teachers that there's a danger that we live in the future a lot of us do that oh when something happens and then I'll be happy when I'm there when I'm married when I'm whatever it is or we live in the past as these people do wasn't it great in the 13th century when Thomas Aquinas was in Paris wasn't it great when Hemingway and Faulkner and TS Eliot wasn't it great in the Belle époque and of course the fine line is every period is ambiguous you don't mind you I think woody allen's trying to remind us that you know the same Hemingway who did indeed write beautiful prose was also deeply unhappy man whose life ended in suicide scott Fitzgerald who wrote some of those beautiful sentences in the 20th century was also a hopeless alcoholic who died in destitution Picasso I mean the grace painter since Rembrandt was also a anyways a terrible man you know every time is ambiguous we shouldn't look to the future and live there or look to the past and live there but rather live right now because this is the time that's real the time that's given to us with all its ambiguity so we tend to see all the negativity of the present I I live in the president's tunic look every time is negative and positive but this is the time you've been given and so live radically now make your choices now follow God's will now the spiritual teacher is an Woody Allen I think are seeing the importance of that you know it's wonderful how he brings it together I won't give a way to ending the movie but deal at the very end says you know Paris really is the most beautiful in the rain so you think of Paris in a beautiful sunny day you're up on MoMA looking at the skyline of the city but actually Paris is I can testify to that is very beautiful in the rain scene that's the point though is that the rain all the negativity all the the darkness but actually that's when things are most beautiful when I'm living dramatically in the now

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

Views: 48,657

Rating: 4.8811431 out of 5

Keywords: Fr. Robert Barron, Word On Fire, Catholicism, Catholic, Christianity, religion, church, faith, God, Jesus, bible, Woody Allen, Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Midnight In Paris, movie, movie review, Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Paris, France, Dali, Gertrude Stein, Picasso

Id: UbMKZn98RIo

Length: 7min 46sec (466 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 07 2011