To Rome With Love: Vintage Woody Allen

Written by Mark Schumann, Father of Three
Thursday, 12 July 2012 15:20

As we enjoy the summer movie season — with big action films and comedies filling theaters — the Reel Dad looks for nutritional movie choices. This week’s pick is a new comedy from Woody Allen, To Rome With Love.

Woody Allen is the ultimate cinema chef. Over 47 years he has made some 48 visits to the movie kitchen to concoct some of the most memorable moments in memory.

Who can forget when Annie Hall fights the lobster in the kitchen or Hannah serves Thanksgiving to her sisters or the celebrated writers stroll Paris at midnight?

This prolific writer and director rarely strays from what he knows will work on screen. Someone, somehow, will learn something that has remained successfully hidden for a long time.

To Rome With Love, the new Allen comedy, offers the best and worst of this creative master at work. On the plus side, Allen follows a delightful ensemble of characters as they explore their fantasies against a beautiful Roman background. The comic situations and dialogue are vintage Woody. But the filmmaker has so much fun telling their stories that he fails to connect the scenarios in a cohesive way. While the movie features tasty ingredients, it misses coming together as an unforgettable delight. Perhaps, this time, the cook forgot to add something to bind.

Here we are in Rome with a typical group of Allen eccentrics. Woody portrays a retired opera director, married to profound psychiatrist Judy Davis, arriving to visit their daughter who has fallen in love with an Italian lawyer. The young man’s father, a mortician, boasts a lovely operatic voice that only shines when he sings in the shower.

Across town, Jesse Eisenberg is an eager architect captivated by his girlfriend’s best chum while collecting advice from a mysterious American visitor. Along the way, a no-name clerk becomes an instant media celebrity simply because the television cameras need someone to shoot.

Allen attempts to connect these vignettes with thoughts on the mysteries of truth, fantasy and illusions that people create. But this under developed point of view remains secondary to the joy of the individual sequences. While Allen carefully reveals the actual amidst the silly, he fails to tell us what it can all mean. 

Ultimately, while the film offers delicious laughs, it leaves an aftertaste of mild disappointment. If only the filmmaker had remembered that his ability to connect the dots is part of what makes his movies so special.

The performances, however, are lovely. Eisenberg proves highly capable at high comedy while Ellen Page matches him in a delightful parody of a self-absorbed actress. Robert Benigini is a subtitled joy as the Italian everyman who becomes a celebrity, Penelope Cruz is hysterical as a woman of the night, and Davis makes us want to see a whole movie about her fascinating character. Woody himself hasn’t been this much fun as an actor for a long time as he gives himself many of the film’s best one-liners.

An Allen near miss is, of course, more entertaining than most of what we see on the screen. So if To Rome With Love isn’t quite what we hoped for, we shouldn’t have to wait too long before he returns to the kitchen to create another offering for our movie menu. 

Film Nutritional Value

To Rome With Love

* Content: Medium. This visit to Rome is worth the price of admission for the good laughs from veteran moviemaker Woody Allen.

* Entertainment: High. While not destined to be a classic, the film features enough movie silliness to entertain.

* Message: Low. Allen never quite articulates what all this is about or how the vignettes connect.

* Relevance: Medium. Any opportunity to escape the heat with a visit to Rome is welcome during the summer.

* Opportunity for Dialogue: Medium. You and your older children may enjoy remembering your favorite characters.

(To Rome With Love is rated R for some sexual references. The film runs 102 minutes.)

3-1/2 Popcorn Buckets

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