By Sunni Brown Wilkinson

             The artist’s job is not to succumb to despair but to find
                   an antidote for the emptiness of existence.
                     –Gertrude Stein in Midnight in Paris.

I’ll admit something: all through graduate school I kept this to myself, but . . . I never liked Gertrude Stein. I remember a woman in my cohort swooning over Tender Buttons, but every time I read a Stein poem, I was just confused. What was she trying to accomplish? I didn’t get it. It felt too erudite, too experimental for me. Also a Stein fan, a professor at a nearby college told me she wanted to teach scansion to her Intro to Poetry students using Stein’s poems, and I couldn’t think of a better way to turn undergrads off poetry. Or Stein.

The photos didn’t do Stein any favors either. She looked severe with her short haircut and the perennial scowl she turned to the camera. She seemed terrifying. Someone more likely to be your friend’s ancient great aunt who only spoke to her dogs than a world-travelling, ground-breaking poet. Enter Kathy Bates in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

Instead of that ancient great aunt, Bates’s Gertrude Stein is a fast-talking, animated, highly intelligent, and welcoming woman who lives in style, speaks several languages, and has rightfully earned the respect of every great artist in or around Paris. She’s the epicenter of the bustling community that produced some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. I immediately liked her. Was this the person I’d been missing out on all these years?

In the film, Gil Pender, an aspiring American novelist with a penchant for the past, travels to France with his fiancée and inexplicably finds himself immersed in 1920s Paris when he steps into a cab at midnight. His night hours become artistic escapades as he rubs shoulders with many of his heroes.

The literary icons loom large, and while Djuna Barnes, T. S. Eliot, and Archibald MacLeish make brief appearances in the salon or in a cab or night club, they’re basically props. It’s Stein who is the star. And the authority figure. The moody Picasso and the dramatic Hemingway are shown tormented by their own art, seemingly directionless at times, and their egos are as thick as the boots they wear, but they appear quite reliant on her. Hemingway is practicall gaga for her approval. And as she argues with Picasso (in both French and English) over his new painting of his lover, it’s clear, as artists, they are on equal footing.

This so starkly contrasts the experience of the multitudes of other women artists who failed to break through the male-dominated art scenes of their days. Truthfully, I think I appreciate Bates’s performance more than anyone else’s simply because it represents someone truly revolutionary, which I hadn’t fully realized until I saw the film for the first time. In the flesh (well, Bates’s flesh), she’s mesmerizing. 

Sure, most of the characters in their brief cameo-like appearances are more or less two-dimensional, planted in scenes to make us, like Gil, catch our breath in recognition (“wait! That’s Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald!”), laugh at the overdone stereotyping of artists (Dali repeating “rhinoceros” passionately behind his iconic moustache), and finally feel validated for being arts and humanities majors. (Who wouldn’t relish being able to smugly identify every character of the film and their real-life backstories instead of just waiting for a fight scene to be over?)

But Stein is whip smart, self-assured without being egotistical, at ease in the company of all kinds of male artists, organized, purposeful, and an expert on not just “Art” but other people’s art. She does more than foil the mysterious and sexy Adriana, who Gil falls in love with, or the shallow and annoying Inez, Gil’s fiancée. She’s wholly herself, far less caricature than the others. She embodies the excitement of what a woman could start to do in the opening of the twentieth century. She believes not only in the power of art but the power of the artist. And of the artistic community. She’s objective when all the other artists are emotional. And for a female to be that presence feels incredibly refreshing. She sharply contrasts the severely moody or near hysterical painters and novelists. A woman poet guiding the unstable male masses? No wonder I like her.

I can’t help but wonder, though: Is it Kathy Bates’s version of Gertrude Stein that I like so much? Or have I finally been schooled on Stein in a more palatable way, i.e. the silver screen, a witty comedy, actors I already enjoy? How accurate is this interpretation? And does Bates interpret Stein more warmly, more personably than she actually was?

I have no real answers to any of those questions, but I can tell you that I did read more of Stein’s poetry after I watched the film and, truthfully, I’m still not a fan. Her work feels like a closed door to me, void of emotion or intimacy. As if I’m trying to climb a wall with no footholds. And yet—I can’t deny that she helped bring to light some of the greatest artists of her day. I enjoy knowing her as a larger-than-life luminary, editor extraordinaire, no-nonsense woman about town (and other grandiose alliterative phrases), but I’d rather not read her.

Perhaps this is also a sentiment shared by Woody Allen himself. One of the surprising absences of the film is of Stein’s own work. It does nothing to exhibit her art. She’s quick to offer commentary but we never hear her read or say anything that suggests her own unusual gifts of language. If she says Gil has a promising book, everyone believes it, no questions asked. Hemingway tells Gil, “She’s the only one I trust with my writing.” She’s a voice of reason, intelligence, frankness. But she’s only a critic. She’s intelligent, even stern at times, but in Bates’s performance, she still comes off less as an active artist herself and more as a mother figure to artistic children.

That a female artist is level-headed, objective and essentially cool is somewhat of a surprise in a Woody Allen film. Not that strong women are entirely missing from his catalogue, but she serves absolutely no romantic purpose, and this alone makes her stand out. I wonder if it’s that this film came along later in Allen’s career (after some of his scandals, perhaps when he was being more measured in his depictions of female characters) or that Stein herself lives outside of traditional femininity. She seems to have one foot in a matronly role and the other in a man’s.

The last time I watched Midnight in Paris was around Christmas 2025. A week or so after my husband and I watched it again, I saw Ballet West perform their annual, nationally famous production of The Nutcracker. One of my favorite parts is when Mother Buffoon (in other performances listed as ‘Mother Ginger’), a towering figure in a giant hoop skirt and bright circles of rouge on her cheeks, glides across the stage, lifts her circus tent-sized skirts, and invites out, two at a time, a host of bouncing little dancers. They each get their moment to shine before Mother Buffoon coaxes them back into her skirts. She’s clearly a matron of sorts, but her femininity is also laughable. Typically, a man dresses up for the part and, as far as I can tell, sits on the shoulders of another man for the performance. The enormous stature of the character, her authority, her humor and warmth, reminded me, oddly, of this representation of Stein—gathering the artists about her, creating community, coaching them, letting them out to shine in their particular circles and fame, then gathering them back in.

In a recent review of Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, a new biography by Francesca Wade, critic Becca Rothfeld suggests, “In the end, she had no choice but to entrust those who outlived her to secure her designation as the high priestess of literary modernism.” This is after Stein dubbed herself “the creativeliterary mind of the century,” in historical company with Homer, Shakespeare, and even The Bible. High priestess certainly comes off in Midnight in Paris, but we’re still not convinced of Stein’s artistry.

Maybe, in the end, she’s simply the victim of exactly what we do to all historical figures, genius or not. As Stein argues with Picasso about his new painting in Midnight in Paris, she rests her case on this final judgement: “It’s more like a still-life than a portrait.”

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Sunni Brown Wilkinson’s newest poetry collection Rodeo won the 2024 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and was longlisted for the 2026 PEN/Voelcker Poetry Award. Other books are The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press) and The Ache & The Wing (winner of the Sundress Chapbook Prize). She teaches at Weber State University and loves hiking in the Wasatch and Uinta Mountains in northern Utah with her husband and three sons.