Review: To Rome with Love

There are two sorts of people—those who find exquisite pleasure in Woody Allen’s films and those who shrug their shoulders in bemusement at them. The exquisite pleasure felt by the first group arises from Allen’s sophisticated comedic idiom, a delectable mélange of his trademark neurotic humor (an acknowledged source of inspiration for Larry David when crafting Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm), his romantic intrigues (which indulge in the unfathomable and often laughable whimsicality of love) and the rich cultural, musical, and artistic references that pepper his scripts.  Those who shrug their shoulders in bemusement do so most often because they find Allen’s neurotic comedic digressions more abstruse than absurd and his films too loosely-connected to sustain emotional investment.

Allen’s latest film, To Rome with Love, is at once one of his most charming and one of his most loosely-connected. As such, it will no doubt satisfy and vex the two parties above.  In terms of comedic bite, quality of character definition, or cleverness of plot construction, it does not rival earlier masterpieces such as Hannah and Her Sisters or Crimes and Misdemeanors. But like recent offerings Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Midnight in Paris, it entices with lovely European backdrops, quirky characters struggling with romantic, artistic, and indeed existential dilemmas, and with a first-rate cast.

The film opens with an apt metaphor for the comedic charivari that is to follow:  a Roman traffic cop, standing at one of the city’s most chaotic intersections, calmly introduces himself, framing the happenings that follow. What follows is a series of comedic cinematic interludes woven together only by virtue of the fact that all occur within the ancient walls of the cittá eterna. In their sheer randomness, these interludes partake of the controlled chaos of Roman traffic.

There are recent precedents for this kind of multi-pronged plot (or plurality of plots). Some are delightful (Love Actually, Paris, je t’aime come to mind here). Others, like Valentine’s Day, are vapid and unoriginal. None of the individual storylines in To Rome With Love is overly compelling, but taken together, the tales provide light and witty diversion well worth an afternoon at the movie theater. There are no great metaphysical revelations here, only slightly sophisticated fun at the box office. Indeed, one would be wise to choose two hours with Allen’s flawed but likeable characters in Rome than with the prodigiously obstreperous and equally insipid crew of Marvel’s Avengers. As one has come to expect from Allen, most of the storylines revolve around romance, more precisely around the ambiguous feelings that love creates: the thrill of temptation, the delicious naughtiness of infidelity, the guilt that washes over after the act is done. Temptations are most often given into here; ambitions are realized (either in reality or fantasy worlds), and everything seems possible in Old Rome.

Not all of the storylines are played out in English, adding to the film’s charm. Penelope Cruz makes an appearance as a high-class hooker who seduces a demure and otherwise uxorious fiancé, masquerading as his fiancée after his intensely prudish catch them in flagrante delicto in their hotel room. Cruz dazzles not just with her incomparable beauty but with her linguistic skills (her Italian is nearly flawless). Roberto Benini (known to most for his role in Life is Beautiful) acts out the role of a middle-class Italian whose humdrum life has inexplicably been endowed with the importance of a luminary. One of the smartest scenes in the film involves a television interview with Benini over how he had buttered his toast that morning.

Allen himself makes an appearance as a retired opera director, and he has lost very little of his comic panache. In one of the film’s more clever scenes, he hears father of his daughter’s Italian fiancé, a middle-aged and generally joyless mortician, singing Puccini in the shower. The father, played by Fabio Armiliato (in fact a renowned tenor off-screen who has performed at La Scala and the Met), cannot manage to sustain his vocal brilliance outside the confines of a shower, so Allen’s character manages to use his clout to enable an avant-garde staging of Pagliacci involving a tenor performing perpetually under the steady flow of a showerhead.

Jesse Eisenberg, known most recently for his role as Mark Zuckerberg in the Social Network, is involved in another of the film’s notable scenes. He plays an American ex-pat architect in Rome, bristling with the neurotic-comic energy of Allen himself. As so many of Allen’s characters, he is involved in a steady but ultimately humdrum relationship, and once exposed to his wife’s best friend, a petite nymphette with a knack for name-dropping and brainy references (Ellen Page), he has no recourse but infidelity.

Yet the real highlight of the film is Alec Baldwin as the cynical dating consigliere to Eisenberg’s character, an imaginary role model/companion akin to Elvis in True Romance or Tyler Durden in Fight Club.  Baldwin, with his wry, dimpled and slightly sinister smile, is ideal for this role, dispensing caustic wit with ease and exposing Ellen Page’s hollow pseudo-intellectualism.

If there is one significant flaw in this film (and indeed in Allen’s most recent European offerings), it is the picture postcard quality of the mise en scène. Allen creates here and in the Paris and Barcelona films a simulacrum of European refinement and elegance that knows no analogue in reality. These are, to be sure, among the world’s most beautiful cities, but they should be seen in a more realistic light than Allen offers. Only the scene’s opening sequence properly underscores the fact that Rome is defined more by chaos and noise than Apollonian tranquility, and those who have traveled to the Italian capital can certainly appreciate this fact.

Then again, cinema need not always be about gritty realism, and the fairy-tale element in Allen’s newest films is perhaps well at home in the Old World.