Not at the level that made Woody Allen a household name, Midnight in Paris nevertheless rises above the recent pedestrian works that gave cause to wonder. Without the usual whiny kvetching, it is rewarding if not fully satisfying and indicates that, now closer to eighty than seventy, the writer-director has found peace with life as he finds it.

The existential concepts of forming one’s own self through choices and of living in the situational present, are brought in too late, afterthoughts of the next-to-last scene to be acted upon in the last one, and if they are too neatly spelled out for us by the hitherto indecisive hero Gil (Owen Wilson), the “philosophy” is less sermonized and pompous than in many another Allen film.

Nobel Laureate William Faulkner wrote, and Nobel Laureate Barack Obama rephrased, that the past is neither dead nor even truly past. Interpretations are divergent, but in Midnight in Paris it would seem that, rosiness and all, the past was fittest for its time but needs to be seen in perspective and that the longing for any Golden Era Belle Époque is counterproductive, for each period in its turn looked back with nostalgia to an earlier, supposedly more livable epoch.

Thus Gil is freed to live to his fullest in the Now, to turn away from conditions that do not offer what he wants, to stay in the City of Light, find out if his literary ambitions can be realized -- his attempt per se being more essential than any posited achievement -- and to walk in the rain and encounter love or at least a kindred soul (in Léa Seydoux’ Gabrielle).

The henpecked hero has come to Paris with fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) on semi-pleasure semi-business. They are a mismatched couple from Southern California, she absorbed in shopping for expensive chic with mother (Mimi Kennedy) -- hard-nosed Republican father (Kurt Fuller) is along, too, leery of his liberal son-in-law-to-be -- and in adoring the pedantic pearls of knowledge (and bedroom talents) of her former professor Paul (Michael Sheen), there with his wife (Nina Arianda) for a stint at the Sorbonne. Dreamer more than drinker, Gil has obediently churned out screenplays to satisfy Hollywood studios but not the artist in his soul that wants to polish his novel about nostalgia – which no one else is allowed to read or critique, certainly not materialistic Inez.

Largely interiors, commendably restrained on touristy travelogue, and free of gags aside from a brief detective trapped in regal Versailles, this is a film of characters, though not deep or surprising ones. And characters there are, as at midnight Gil is beckoned into an elegant Peugeot and taken to the bars, cabarets and salons of the Roaring Twenties.

As unapologetic for the mild fantastic as The Purple Rose of Cairo, the screen offers up the glamorous Fitzgeralds, Scott and Zelda; intense egotistic Picasso, macho egotistic Hemingway, loony Dalí, matriarchial Gertrude Stein, “Tom” Eliot, Djuna Barnes, La Baker, Buñuel, bullfighter Belmonte, Cole Porter and an etcetera of celebrities, while later, on a final round-midnight pickup journey into the past, it will be Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Degas, Matisse of an earlier generation.

There is an attraction in recognizing the famous of yesteryear before they are identified, although soon it all becomes intellectually show-offy -- a habitual weakness with the director -- right down to paraphrases of their words and pseudo-philosophies.

Excusing himself from prospective-family activities, Gil goes out nightly, alone after a first failed effort to introduce Inez into this world -- only children and innocents can see Peter Pan. He is in awe of these talents, and then ambivalently involved with Adriana (Marion Cotillard), once mistress to Modigliani among others and currently to Picasso. Drawn to him, too, and a temptress to break his engagement and abandon the present, this artists’ muse inadvertently brings him to his senses and enables him to strike out for the goals and life he really desires.

As in Radio Days and Sweet and Lowdown, the story bathes the past in a warm glow, only to end in the reality of now. Wilson’s befuddlement is for once not drenched with silliness, and the Cannes selection is agreeable if not memorable. “Make all that come true again,” advised Hemingway, but with the caveat that, still, “this is not enough of a book.” 

(Released by Sony Classics and rated “PG-13” for some sexual references and smoking.)