To Rome with Love

Woody Allen stum­bled onto a sur­prise hit with 2011’s Mid­night in Paris, in which an earnest writer finds him­self mag­i­cal­ly trans­port­ed to the City of Light cir­ca 1920, where he hob­nobs with the likes of Ernest Hem­ing­way and Luis Buñuel.

Despite the film’s sup­posed cri­tique of liv­ing in the past, it most­ly got off by lux­u­ri­at­ing in an air­brushed ver­sion of an over­ly fetishised time and place. But for all the film’s con­cep­tu­al rot­ten­ness, a win­ning lead per­for­mance by Owen Wil­son and some fun wink-wink cul­tur­al ref­er­ences made it sur­pris­ing­ly watchable.

Alas, no such com­pen­sato­ry qual­i­ties mark the Woodman’s lat­est, the mirth­less To Rome with Love. One mea­sure of the film’s stal­e­ness is the appear­ance of the writer/​director/​actor him­self. Play­ing Jer­ry, a retired music pro­duc­er, he is intro­duced on a transat­lantic flight doing his clas­sic neu­rot­ic shtick, cow­er­ing in ter­ror when­ev­er the plane hits tur­bu­lence. When he arrives in Rome with his wife to meet his daughter’s Ital­ian beau and fam­i­ly, Jer­ry baulks at his puta­tive in-laws’s left-lean­ing pol­i­tics, wor­ry­ing that his lit­tle girl is mar­ry­ing into a fam­i­ly of communists.

Yes, we’re not sup­posed to take him very seri­ous­ly, and his view­point is coun­tered by more rea­son­able voic­es, but the fact that Allen’s tired grum­bling still seems to be locked into a Cold War mind­set says every­thing about just how out of touch his approach now is.

One could reit­er­ate the usu­al litany of com­plaints about Allen’s nar­row, priv­i­leged con­cep­tion of the world (the fact that the Eter­nal City, like Paris and New York before it, is reduced to pret­ty cul­tur­al sig­ni­fiers), but To Rome with Love actu­al­ly puts the filmmaker’s ambiva­lence about mate­ri­al­ism and fame front and cen­tre. Jer­ry him­self may equate mon­ey and hap­pi­ness, but in the film’s four non- inter­lock­ing nar­ra­tives, these con­cerns are giv­en slight­ly more var­ied treatment.

In one sto­ry­line, an ordi­nary mid­dle-aged Roman (Rober­to Benig­ni) wakes up to find him­self a sud­den celebri­ty for no good rea­son. Soon, news crews are ask­ing about every detail of his life, while film­ing banal activ­i­ties as if they were major events. Not only does this slight con­ceit seem like a rehash of fun­nier Allen moments (remem­ber the live sex in Bananas?), but its com­men­tary on the fleet­ing nature of celebri­ty is both obvi­ous and under­de­vel­oped to the point where the segment’s incon­clu­sive finale feels more con­fused than ambiguous.

The oth­er nar­ra­tives, involv­ing a young archi­tec­ture stu­dent falling for a celebri­ty- obsessed actress, a new­ly­wed who has to pre­tend to be mar­ried to a whore (Pené­lope Cruz, once more type­cast by Allen), and Jer­ry again, who con­ceives of a plan to take an Ital­ian opera singer on stage singing in the show­er, deal more or less with the same themes, reach­ing a vari­ety of per­func­to­ry con­clu­sions through their own laugh-neu­tral storylines.

As the film chugs to an end, there’s no sur­er indi­ca­tion of its lack of inspi­ra­tion than Cruz’s hook­er vis­it­ing the Sis­tine Chapel and crack­ing a joke about how, like Michelan­ge­lo paint­ing the ceil­ing of that struc­ture, she too earns her liv­ing lying on her back. Allen’s juve­nile sex jokes, like his world­view, have regressed rather than evolved.