Last year’s Midnight in Paris, approximately Woody Allen’s 40 gajillionth film as writer and director, came out of nowhere as a surprise success, earning Allen critical acclaim, the highest box office grosses of his career, and another Academy Award (his fourth). Late-period Woody Allen has been so inconsistent that Midnight’s successes surprised pretty much everyone, especially Allen, who expressed utter disbelief at the unpredictable nature of audiences. Commercial and critical agreement have rarely come together for an Allen movie
– lately, anyway
– so it’s hard to blame the famously neurotic auteur for going back to that formula for To Rome with Love. Having struck gold with a nostalgic travelogue of a scenic European city the last time out, Allen tries again, this time with Rome.
Unlike Midnight, which followed a sad-sack screenwriter on a nostalgic trip through Paris’s past that was both literal and figurative, To Rome with Love cuts between four different stories. Allen himself appears in one as grudgingly retired theater director who, while journeying with his wife (Judy Davis) to the city to meet his daughter’s new fiancé, discovers his future father-in-law (tenor Fabio Armilioto) possess a voice perfect for opera – with one major snag. A newlywed couple from the Italian countryside, played by Alessandro Tiberi and Alessandra Mastronardi, get separated amid the bustle of the city and wind up in awkward situations involving an amorous Italian movie star (Antonio Albanese) and a call girl (Penelope Cruz). John (Alec Baldwin) is a successful architect vacationing in Rome who, visiting the neighborhood he lived in as a student decades ago, runs into a young man named Jack (The Social Network’s Jesse Eisenberg) who may or may not be his younger self. John, seeing Jack fall for the same (possibly exactly the same) situation of falling for a flighty, unfaithful actress (Juno herself, Ellen Page), pops in to offer Jack the voice of experience as his love life begins to unravel. Life Is Beautiful’s Roberto Benigni plays it mostly straight as an average, middle-class Italian family man who inexplicably finds himself a massive celebrity, a situation he hates until he loves it and then hates it again.
Allen’s no stranger to recycling his own ideas, and To Rome with Love features a lot of his go-to character types: shrewish, flighty women; bickering married couples; brazen but wise prostitutes; intellectuals, pseudo and otherwise. Taking the goodwill from Midnight in Paris and remixing its most successful elements into a series of short, farcical vignettes, To Rome with Love suffers by comparison both with Midnight and itself. Midnight was transparent in its nostalgic manipulation of the audience, though it was done with enough charm to be forgiven by an audience pleased to see postcard-perfect Paris cityscapes and to have gotten most of the literary jokes. What was uniformly winning in that movie is deployed more cynically here, and with less consistent results. Midnight was about art; all the stories in Rome are about, to some degree, fame.
Allen’s quixotic theater director, hell-bent on using the operatic gifts of his son-in-law’s funeral director father to resuscitate his career, is a prime example of how flaccid the movie’s plotlines can be, a one-note sketch chopped up and stretched to hold up a quarter of a whole movie. The other segments do fare a bit better, with the usually hyperactive Bernigni the only one not overdoing it in his satirically absurd segment, and the newlywed plot ending with the couple a little less naïve and certainly changed by their experiences. Not surprisingly, Baldwin and Eisenberg’s segment, well within Allen’s wheelhouse, is the strongest of the four, alternately bitterly funny and just plain bitter. Baldwin does self-deprecating well, and Eisenberg would be this movie’s Woody Allen Character if it didn’t already have Woody Allen in it.
Allen wants to present Rome as unpredictable, full of love and romance as well as being overwhelming and disappointing. It has the same romanticized quality as Midnight (or Manhattan, for that matter), the stories he has to tell are slighter, the lessons to be found less universal (also like Midnight, a character directly tells the audience the moral of the story near the end of the film). The ghost of Midnight in Paris is all over this film, giving it a somewhat desperate aura of aiming to please: If you don’t like my story, won’t you please remember these pretty shots of the Trevi Fountain? The comparison is somewhat unfair, or at least it would be, if To Rome didn’t go to great pains to evoke that movie, from the title on down (it originally had the more esoteric title Bop Decameron). After one of his well-received movies, Allen has a tendency to put out a dud or two (or three or four), and To Rome with Love doesn’t really belong in those ranks. There’s “Good Woody Allen” and “Bad Woody Allen,” but To Rome with Love can be classified as “Good Enough Woody Allen,” which is still a little too bad considering how hard it tries to ingratiate itself to its audience. It’s occasionally gorgeous, occasionally funny, and never more than the sum of all four of its parts.
Rating: 2.5 Stars
Film: To Rome with Love
Starring: Woody Allen, Judy Davis, Roberto Benigni, Alec Baldwin, Penelope Cruz, Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page, and about a million other people because it’s a Woody Allen movie
Directed By: Woody Allen
Written By: Woody Allen
Produced By: Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum, and Jaume Roures
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: Approximately 100 minutes
Website: sonyclassics.com/midnightinparis
Genre: Comedy
Release Date: July 3, 2011
