Almost any way you cut it, Woody Allen's To Rome With Love (2012) is a disappointment, especially considering that it's the follow-up to what is generally one of the director's most winning films, a masterpiece really, Midnight in Paris. In the post-2000 Allen canon, it's above the truly terrible Anything Else or Hollywood Ending, but not a smear on a decent outing like Small Time Crooks or Whatever Works. This is the price we Allen fans pay: love Match Point, then you'll have to put up with Scoop; get the gift of Midnight in Paris, then you'll be subjected to this.
Allen sees as a Rome as a city of eternal possibility, and, hence, we get his most surreal film. In each storyline, characters are confronted with improbable situations that range from the satiric to silly to the wish fulfillment. Because it's an Allen film, most of them - even if they are briefly tantalized by fame or sex or success - will be hit with disillusionment. Unfortunately, none of the stories are really that interesting and none of them connect with each other.
- Roberto Benigni (where's he been?) plays a boring office worker who suddenly, mysteriously becomes famous, with reporters hounding him, concerned about what he eats for breakfast. It's a nice idea - Allen musing about the whimsies of fame - but it goes on too long and doesn't build to anything. Like most of the stories here, it just kind of peters out.
- Allen and Judy Davis are a couple visiting their daughter (Alison Pill) in Rome and meeting her fiancee and family. Allen's character, a retired avant-garde opera director, discovers that the fiancee's father is a masterful singer... but only when he's in the shower. This leads to a set piece that...kinda works but, again, is probably overextended.
- Jesse Eisenberg (born to be in a Woody Allen movie) and an underused Greta Gerwig play, respectively, an architect and a student living in Rome who are visited by Gerwig's neurotic, charismatic, highly-sexed, culturally aware friend Ellen Page, who instantly forms an attraction to Eisenberg. This whole storyline doesn't go anywhere, with its baffling use of Alec Baldwin proof that actors will do anything - and play anything - to get a role in an Allen movie. By all extents, Baldwin's character certainly seems real - he's a famous architect re-visiting the city he lived in thirty years prior - but, with no evident transition, he morphs into a sort of semi-visible Greek chorus, offering Jesse advice and world-weary opinions. Huh?
- For me, the only storylines that felt complete were, again, fantasies of opportunity and chance, but with slightly more sizzle and humor. Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi) and Milly (Alessandra Mastronardi) are a young couple in Rome one their honeymoon. The two get separated, and Milly becomes entranced with a famous actor, who lures her back to his hotel room. Antonio, meanwhile, is forced to entertain his parents, a fact that is complicated when prostitute Penelope Cruz shows up and is forced to pretend she is his wife! Cruz, by default, walks away with the movie, much as she did in the infinitely better Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
If any of these stories connected or merged together, I would have been left with a better impression of the movie, but, alas, they didn't, and I wasn't. The whole movie consists of sort-of intriguing ideas not fully worked out or explored in entertaining or illuminating ways. What a waste of a perfectly good city! Too long and only occasionally amusing, To Rome With Love just doesn't offer up enough pleasures. No fear for Allen fans, though: He will continue to make a movie a year until he kicks the bucket, and his next one, Blue Jasmine (set in New York and San Francisco ), starring Baldwin, Cate Blanchett, and Peter Sarsgaard, is already in the can and will be out later this year.
Ranking Woody Allen Movies Since 2000
13. Anything Else (2003)
12. Hollywood Ending (2002)
11. Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001)
10. From Rome With Love (2012)
9. Scoop (2006)
8. Melinda and Melinda (2004)
7. Cassandra's Dream (2007)
6. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)
5. Whatever Works (2009)
4. Small Time Crooks (2000)
3. Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)
2. Midnight in Paris (2011)
1. Match Point (2005)
Images courtesy of:
http://thesevensees.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/To-Rome-with-Love-Woody-directing.jpg
http://www.moviepicturedb.com/pictures/12_06/2012/1859650/l_1859650_62b04aad.jpg
http://www.rowthree.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/TOROMEWITHLOVE_550.jpg
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