Can we understand texts that are written for different audiences in different times or cultures?

I watched Midnight In Paris tonight - the movie with Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard about a man who travels to Paris with his fiancee and ends up finding himself - physically and emotionally - in and attached to the Roaring Twenties. While he spends his nights traveling the streets of Paris with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, he finds a spiritual connection to the ideas of the time. He says that he believes all modern literature can be traced back to or inspired by Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Usually, I would disagree and say that it is difficult to fully understand works from a different era - the consequences of the writing were different, the causes, the effects, the ideas and the ideals, are so different from what they are today. The underlying ideas behind Shakespeare's Othello are clear - jealousy and lust are sins that must be avoided. But it is really possible to understand how people came to conclusions of these two emotions centuries ago? If humans truly evolved, the process and the extent to which we process and feel things now and then are quite stark. Although as much as I can argue this, Wilson's character in the movie is able to compare older works with all contemporary literature. In the movie, Hemingway says one of his books was good because it was "an honest story." Is that not what makes a good story now? Can a fantasy book really move people in a way that a non-fiction, heart-wrenching story about war can? I don't think so, and that is partly why I think we can understand the essential ideas of different texts from eras centuries ago - if not the complete stories emotions that played into and came along with the literature, at least the moral of the story.