Owen Wilson is trapped in a bad movie, but through the magic of the titular time & location he takes whimsical journeys to another more charming if insubstantial movie. Wilson starts the film in Paris with his fiancee, a never less enjoyable Rachel McAdams, and her parents; her dad is played by Kurt Fuller, a generic businessman on a generic trip to Paris for a generic corporate merger, who has probably the best line in the film although its better edited in the trailer. Most scenes between Wilson and anyone else in Paris save for the first lady and a fetching shop clerk have conversations with him like this:
Owen Wilson: I like fun. And nice things.
Anyone Else: Fun is stupid. Nice things are stupid. You are stupid. Everything is stupid.
Wilson escapes this army of straw-men, which includes a bearded Michael Sheen who is not nearly as fun as a bearded Michael Sheen should be, by wandering the streets drunk until strangers in a chauffeured Peugeot pick him up and whisk him away. The rest of this review might count as a spoiler.
The car takes him back in time to the 1920's where he parties with the mostly ex-pat community of artists and writers that have since become the towering figures of their respective fields. He drinks with F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda (Tom Hiddleston & Alison Pill) at a few parties before meeting a scene-stealing Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) who refuses to read Wilson's manuscript but agrees to pass it on to Gertrude Stein played by an underused Kathy Bates. Before long he meets and falls for Pablo Picasso's mistress played by Marion Cotillard. Fitzgerald and Hemingway are such a good time that it feels like they should have their own buddy movie, no Wilson included, about the Parisian night life, writing, and how crazy women can be, especially Zelda. Salvador Dali, Cole Porter, and even more I forgot to mention also turn up, and the magic of even further time travel produces a few more artistic greats that have lived in Paris.
Visiting another time period that he had long yearned to experience has a surprising effect on him. At least its surprising for him. It should be obvious to most people that have, I dunno, read books. Anyway, Wilson learns that the past isn't all it's cracked up to be. The passage of time has a way of romantically stripping away superfluous and unpleasant details and turns living, breathing people into immortal icons. Wilson eventually engages in a Stan Marsh-style "I learned something today" speech to sum up the theme of the movie, but at least he learns a lesson in a story that relies so heavily on wish fulfillment; suffice to say, Wilson is awesome, he has some minor problems, everything works out because he's awesome. His greatest hurdle to overcome is figuring out that his shrew of a fiancee is cheating on him so he can end the engagement guilt free.
At least the movie seems to think Wilson is pretty awesome. He's mostly unappealing when dueling with Michael Sheen, whom he accuses of pseudo-intellectualism, even though he can't wait to fawn over the most well known of all his famous friends' accomplishments like a freshman English student. Hearing him tell T.S Eliot in his distinctive Wilsonian patter that "Prufrock is [his] mantra" made me groan audibly, but only seconds later he tells him that he comes from a time when people "measure their time in coke spoons" and I had to groan both audibly and visibly, turning my face away from the screen momentarily so as not to get permanent bullshit blindness: what the fuck is a coke spoon? The original line is 'coffee spoons' and I understand he is referencing that. But does he mean spoons that people use to stir Coca-Cola? Or does he mean people that do so much cocaine that they carry around a fucking spoon for it?
If you didn't get either of those Eliot jokes, this movie might not be for you. It's certainly not a requirement to know who any of the artists are, but most of the movie is essentially a series of witty in-jokes on their work and lives. If you don't know the plot of the film 'The Exterminating Angel' for example, then you might not get the joke when Wilson describes it to its creator Luis Bunuel some forty years before he would create it; the high culture version of the 'Back to the Future' joke with Marvin Berry. This movie is mildly entertaining, a postcard film in the both the best and worst ways, that ultimately feels like the over-educated version of 'Back to the Future' for people who probably think they are way too good for 'Back to the Future.'
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