Saw Midnight in Paris last night. (The next youngest person in the theater was probably three times my daughter’s age, at least.) It was a good one — Owen Wilson did a creditable job as Woody Allen’s mouthpiece, and the modernist name dropping worked well. But more than anything the movie, especially the present-day sequences, reminded me that Allen’s most enduring concern — more than his neuroses or intellectual/anti-intellectual pretensions, urbanophilia, May-September romanticism or even humor — is illustrating the lifestyles of the very rich. That first struck me with Hannah and Her Sisters, but with each movie, good, bad or indifferent, it has become clearer and clearer. There’s a vicarious pleasure in watching people have such wonderful lives so effortlessly, be it their admirable New York apartments or their ability to roam Paris freely. What the characters screw up in his plots is typically something other than the underlying lifestyle. What I’ve never tried to investigate is whether it’s self-conscious or if he truly can only make movies about himself and his circle. I used to believe the latter, but Allen’s particular form of self-absorbed introspection makes it hard to believe it’s not intentional.