Woody Allen’s “To Rome With Love” is a movie about living out your fantasies of love and discovery. Its stories aren’t likely, so it’s a fantasy of its own, but not in the way of “Midnight in Paris.” Rather, it’s like the warm and gooey dream that feels embarrassingly stupid after you wake up.
In the last few years, Allen has made a trilogy of films in Europe, first in Barcelona, then in Paris and now the Italian Eternal City of Rome. The first problem is that this feels more like a travelogue than any of the others. It invites you into the city and makes time for sightseeing and an admiration of architecture, but then it makes its native Italians into goofy caricatures.
We see Romans as adulterers, Communists, sex craved, tabloid craved, wanderers with no sense of direction and angry mothers brandishing butcher knives.
The movie itself has this two-handed approach to its fantasies. “To Rome With Love” simultaneously tries to pull you toward and away from the romance of the story. The four anecdotes it tells are too dopey to be taken seriously and too familiar and incidental to really laugh at.
The first fantasy is a simple meet-cute between Michelangelo and Hayley (Flavio Parenti and Allison Pill). They fall in love instantly and each invites the other to meet the parents. Hayley’s father Jerry (Allen in his first screen role since 2006’s “Scoop”) is a retired music producer who believes he can make a star out of Michelangelo’s father when he hears him sing opera in the shower.
The second story involves the newlywed couple Milly and Antonio (Alessandra Mastronardi and Alessandro Tiberi), a timid pair who get separated in the city just before they’re scheduled to meet their parents. As they search for each other, they each live out sexual fantasies with a movie star (Antonio Albanese) and a prostitute (Penelope Cruz) respectfully.
The third introduces us to Jack and Sally (Jesse Eisenberg and Greta Gerwig), two 20-somethings living and studying in Italy and in love with one another. Sally invites her friend Monica (Ellen Page) to stay with them, who acts as a compulsive seductress and faux-intellectual around Jack until he too falls for her. This happens despite the warnings of Jack’s own inner-conscience, who is acted out by Alec Baldwin.
The last and most ridiculous fantasy is simply the story of an ordinary man, Leopoldo (Roberto Benigni), who suddenly becomes famous for no apparent reason. Reporters and paparazzi hound him with meaningless questions about his breakfast and his choice of boxers and briefs until he is exhausted.
All of these fantasies are about love, but not all are about romance. For Allen, love comes in the form of attention, infatuation, sex and fulfillment. This is an interesting take, and it makes “To Rome With Love” more ambitious than other rom-coms.
But why then does it have to be so haphazardly goofy and dumb? These stories are rooted in the real world, so it lacks the whimsy of “Midnight in Paris” (it cannot even begin to be compared with Allen’s work in his prime). And no matter how many times Allen calls attention to his gimmick with the Baldwin character trying to implode the fantasy, we realize that Allen does not have a great grasp on a modern mentality. The kids talk like adults from another generation, and the references range from obscure to inscrutable.
This is a disappointing Allen dud, but not completely unpredictable based on his track record from the last 20 years.
2 ½ stars