Sony Pictures ClassicsWhen you think "time travel movie," chances are you're thinking of a Delorean revving up to 88 miles per hour, a fantastical H.G. Wells-style machine, or maybe Tony Stark inventing something that will let superheroes save the day by saving yesterday. You're probably not thinking of a nebbish writer meandering down a Paris street late at night. And yet Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, which turns 15 years old today, deserves to be recognized as one of the great time travel movies. A work of quaint fantasy rather than science fiction, Midnight in Paris nevertheless uses some established time travel tropes to create a cozy (and quietly devastating) metaphor for escapist nostalgia.Owen Wilson stars as Gil Pender, a successful, unfulfilled screenwriter who could correctly be described as a Woody Allen-type. (Allen wrote and directed the 2011 film; he doesn't appear in it himself.) Gil is in Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) for their honeymoon, though it's clear almost from the jump that the two are not right for one another. He's a disillusioned romantic who is probably a little frustrating at times; she's a materialist with no patience for his flights of fancy. One night, when he gets lost while taking a late stroll rather than accompany Inez to dance with an old college friend of hers, a Peugeot taxi straight out of the 1920s pulls up, and its occupants beckon Gil to get in.Gil suddenly finds himself back in time in the Années folles—Paris' jazz age—a golden era that he feels a deep nostalgia and longing for despite having been born well after it ended. He meets literary icons like F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pil), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), and Ernest Hemingway (a scene-stealing Cory Stoll). He also meets artists like Salvador Dalí (Adrien Brody), Man Ray, and Pablo Picasso. It's pure wish-fulfillment. Creatively uninspired and personally aimless in the present, Gil feels like he's found where he really belongs back in the '20s. He's also found Adriana, a (fictional) mistress of Picasso, played by Marion Cotillard. The two immediately hit it off, and as Gil spends his nights in the 1920s and dreary days in the present with Inez, 90 years later, the former seems to offer everything he's longed for.In almost all of the most iconic time travel movies, the mechanics of time travel are pretty important, whether it's an invention, a magical relic, or a telephone booth with a Time Lord or Bill and Ted inside. Midnight in Paris offers no explanation for why this is happening to Gil—the car simply pulls up at this Paris street corner when the clock strikes midnight. Yet there are familiar time travel tropes that put Midnight in Paris in line with other time travel stories. The number of famous people of the '20s who appear in big or cameo roles verges on a basket of historical Easter eggs as audiences use their knowledge of the past to delight in Gil's latest encounter. Gil uses knowledge of the past to his advantage at times, one-upping Inez's pedantic friend (Michael Sheen) with the real story of a Picasso painting they're viewing in the present because he actually met the woman it's a portrait of in the past. Gil happens to find Adriana's journal at an antique stall in the present and similarly uses it for insights into how she really feels (or felt) about him. There's even a suggestion of a causal loop—a classic time travel paradox—when Gil gives filmmaker Luis Buñuel the idea for his most famous films, The Exterminating Angel.These familiar chronological narrative shenanigans are a garnish to the true objective of Midnight in Paris' time travel. The climax comes not when Gil accidentally unleashes a butterfly effect upon the present but when he learns an important, if perhaps slightly dissatisfying, truth. More than being another era in time, the 1920s represent a magical solution. Gil is longing for fulfillment, and living in the past—an impossibility without the fantasy of time travel—could provide that for him. Except it doesn't. Adriana is disillusioned with her present, and when a horse-drawn carriage appears to take her and Gil a half-century earlier to the Belle Époque, she thinks that she's found the place where she'll be fulfilled. The artists they encounter there, of course, are pinning for the Renaissance.Gil eventually realizes that chasing nostalgia doesn't work, no matter how alluring it might be—and Midnight in Paris makes the bars of 1920s Paris seem quite alluring. That's part of the magic of Midnight in Paris. Even as the movie is telling you that it's a fool's errand to yearn for a perfect past, it's such a tantalizing fantasy. That's why it's both heartening and more than a little melancholy when Gil realizes he can't keep longing for the past, let alone keep living it. Instead, he'll make a go of it in the present even if it's "a little unsatisfying." (That doesn't mean he needs to stay with Inez, though. Part of living in the present means resolving to try to make the best of it!)Roughly midday in Paris as seen in Midnight in Paris. | Sony Pictures ClassicsDespite not being on many lists of the great time travel movies, Midnight in Paris is one of the best the subgenre has to offer, for the way it uses the fantasy of time travel to reflect on our present. Perhaps that's the mark of a time travel movie that will stand the test of, well, time.As it would happen, there's an extra level of time-traveling resonance when watching Midnight in Paris in 2026. The present-day scenes are now 15 years in the past. As Inez's dad, a classic American idiot, vents about France not pitching in to help in the Global War on Terror, getting mad about Gil's disparaging comments about the Tea Party, you can't help but sadly smile. Those were the problems back then? And Paris sure looked pretty a decade and a half ago. Might it be nice to travel back in time ourselves to that era? This little bit of longing only strengthens the film's message. A taxi from the 2010s isn't about to pull up and take us to the faux-halcyon days of yesteryear. Instead of wishing we could travel through time, maybe we can try to remember there's a chance we're already living in somebody else's imagined golden age, for better or worse.Midnight in Paris is streaming on Tubi.