A guy's on a trip to Paris with his fiancee. Gil (Owen Wilson) is a hack Hollywood screenwriter bemoaning the fact that he never became a "real" author and, besotted by the city's charms, toys with the idea of staying and doing just that. Inez (Rachel McAdams) is a castrating harpy who won't buy into his romantic artistic dream when she can buy diamonds and antiques with his crap-movie paychecks instead. Thus it's no wonder our hero's eye wanders when an alluring, mysterious French muse named Adriana (Marion Cotillard) enters the picture.
So far, so Woody Allen. The slow curveball he throws in "Midnight in Paris" comes from the fact that Adriana exists in the 1920s, where she's the mistress of Pablo Picasso and Amedeo Modigliani. Gil meets her when he gets staggeringly drunk on bordeaux, the clock strikes midnight, and he hops a magical cab ride back in time to the Jazz Age Paris of his dreams. The next thing he knows he's hobnobbing with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter, Salvador Dali and a host of other luminaries.
"Midnight in Paris" plays out both as light comedy — "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure" for people with liberal arts degrees — and also as Allen's self-examination of his own obsession with the era. It's much more of the former than the latter, as evidenced by the fact that this is Allen's biggest success in decades, reportedly breaking the $100 million mark at the box office.