If I had my way

I would move

To another lifetime.

I’d quit my job,

Ride the train through the misty nighttime.

I’d be ready when my feet touched ground

Wherever I come down

And if the folks will have me

Then they’ll have me:

Any world that I’m welcome to [X3]

Is better

Than the one

I come from.

—Steely Dan, “Any World That I’m Welcome To”

My epigraph comes from a song that has moved me to moistened eyes and head-shaking smiles many a time; they’re lines from one of the many priceless musical gifts bequeathed us by Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, better known as Steely Dan.

Sometimes, when the world overwhelms me with its violence and vulgarity, its obscenity, even its banality, there are also films to which I return much the same way one needs the refuge of a song or certain friends or one’s family, the haven of a familiar home, or the comfort of a favorite milieu, be it the beach or mountains or just a nearby park.

For me, one of those films is Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen’s life-affirming, soul-restoring masterpiece of 2011.

If you had told me the plot before I’d seen it, I would never have believed I would enjoy Midnight in Paris, let alone adore it. As with my reading predilections, I crave reality. I believe there should be a 20-year moratorium on all Star Wars films. I can’t tell you how tiresome I find zombies (besides, with smartphones and ear-buds, who needs celluloid zombies—the streets teem with real ones!) Vampires, CGI, the firehose of apocalyptic action that are Marvel movies . . . enough! So the idea that even an incredibly amiable screenwriter and wannabe novelist—main character Gil Pender, played by Owen Wilson—slips through a wrinkle in time each midnight to find himself back in A Moveable Feast-era Paris would normally nix it for me.

But Woody makes it impossible to resist, having mastered his material, perfected his angles, his eye and ear trained, tuned, and both pitch perfect. He begins with that glorious series of shots of contemporary Paris (more like portraits)—a heart-swelling homage—mated to a ravishing Jazz masterpiece from 1953, “Si tu vois ma mére” (“If you see my mother”), a song written and performed by Sidney Bechet. Originally from New Orleans, Bechet, a legendary soprano saxophonist, clarinetist, and composer, moved to Paris in 1951. In the context of those portraits, Bechet’s song sounds as if two cities fell in love, New Orleans walking hand-in-hand with Paris, wooing her every swinging step of the way, its echo effect like NoLa saying “I love you” with the City of Lights replying “I love you too.”

And then there’s the film’s delightful theme song, “Bistro Fada,” written and performed by contemporary French guitarist Stéphane Wrembel. I point out “contemporary” because you might otherwise think the song was a classic by Gypsy Jazz great (and Paris sensation) Django Reinhardt. Allen weaves this Romani-inflected, full-on jangly Django tribute throughout the movie. It often reminds me of the famed “Third Man Theme” played by Austrian zither player Anton Karas and which director Carol Reed deployed to equally memorable effect.

Midnight in Paris delivers continuous pleasure; I enjoy every scene and anticipate so many with relish. It’s a Woody Allen film, so the laughs abound. The castings delight me every time. I’d never taken Owen Wilson seriously before, but his wholesale absorption of Woody Allen’s persona and delivery, as well as his own contributions to the character of Gil Pender blew me away: bravo! Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein: brilliant! Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill’s F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald: exactly how I imagine them! And Adrien Brody’s Salvador Dalí and his preoccupation with the rhinoceros—damn, that never fails to make me howl!

I could lavish paragraphs on scene after scene, but I’ll choose one—maybe my favorite—to show you why Midnight in Paris is a place I go to feel good. Or better.

I have a concept called the Mini-Oscar: the Academy ought to award diminutive versions of its gold statues to an actor or actress for a particularly memorable scene. Perhaps the whole role didn’t merit “Best Actor/Actress,” but the performance in this one scene deserves recognition.

With his whiskers and eyes a-twinkle, Robert Shaw earned one as Quint in Jaws when he instantly sobered up his two crew members—Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss—with his riveting tale of how he survived the sinking and subsequent shark feeding-frenzy of the USS Indianapolis (Shaw deserved extra credit as he wrote that scene himself.) You won’t find a more eloquent soliloquy in film—the factual details, the surprising bonhomie and conversational warmth, those startlingly poetic observations.

Corey Stoll’s portrayal of the young Moveable Feast-years Hemingway earns my nod for a Mini-Oscar.

Gil meets up with Hem a second time when that magical car (a 1928 Peugeot Type 184 Landaulet) pulls up at the stroke of midnight. Gil gets in the back (practically a small salon with window shades) and Stoll, as the swaggering young expat, sans greeting or preface, launches into this wonderful delivery:

The assignment was to take the hill. There were four of us—five if you counted Vicente but he had lost his hand when a grenade went off and couldn’t fight as he could when I first met him. And he was young and brave and the hill was soggy from days of rain and it sloped down toward a road and there were many German soldiers on the road and the idea was to aim for the first group and if our aim was true we could delay them.

The exchange that follows is essential Woody Allen humor, his classic blend of self-effacement, sanity, and humanity. Sideswiped by what must be a passage from a short story or novel in the works, Gil asks Hemingway if he was scared. Knowing the answer, Hem still asks: “of what?”

Gil: “Getting killed.”

To which Hemingway instantly replies: “You’ll never write well if you fear dying. Do you?”

Gil responds: “Yeah, I do, it’s probably, it would probably be my greatest fear, actually.”

“Well it’s something all men before you have done, all men will do.”

“I know, I know.”

Then Hemingway takes a different tack: “Have you ever made love to a truly great woman?”

Gil lights up: “Actually my fiancée is pretty sexy.”

“And when you make love to her you feel true and beautiful passion and you, for at least that moment, lose your fear of death.”

“No, that doesn’t happen.”

And then, with no hesitation, Hemingway drops this tour de force declaration of principles on a wide-eyed Gil:

I believe that love that is true and real creates a respite from death. All cowardice comes from not loving or not loving well, which is the same thing. And when the man who is brave and true looks death squarely in the face like some rhino hunters I know or Belmonte, who’s truly brave, it is because they love with sufficient passion to push death out of their minds—until it returns, as it does to all men, and then you must make really good love again…. Think about it.

Amen. One of my favorite scenes in any movie! And you better believe I can recite all those lines and occasionally blindside a friend or acquaintance with “the assignment was to take the hill….”

There are several other portals through which characters slip in the film, most notably and poignantly when a horse-drawn carriage pulls up to transport Gil and his 1920s love interest Adriana back to La Belle Époque. They visit the Moulin Rouge where they have an instructive conversation with Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, and Degas. For Adriana, Paris was Paris in La Belle Époque; the three artists feel that the city peaked during the Renaissance.

Gil has an epiphany and sees how every generation looks longingly to an earlier time, a “beautiful era.” Adriana decides to stay in Belle Époque Paris. Gil finds new love in the Paris of the present day. But it was Woody Allen and his glorious opening portraits of the city one summer afternoon who told us right at the start that Paris is still Paris, juiced with joie de vivre.

The present age is the only one in which we get to live. If I can’t go back to a better, vanished time or the Paris of earlier eras, I can always return to my cinematic refuge. And if the folks will have me, then they’ll have me.