Woody Allen again proves he’s the master of inconsistency with this disappointing follow-up to the wonderful Midnight In Paris. Just when he had managed to erase the ghastly memory of his truly awful London trilogy of Match point, Cassandra’s Dream and Scoop, he moves the action to Rome, but with only partial successs.
The underlying idea of the film is based on The Decameron, a medieval collection of stories, and Allen’s film is similarly a sprawling, multi-storied thing that wanders about, coming to no great conclusions.
At its most successful From Rome With Love is on familiar Allen territory. Jesse Eisenberg is a young architecture student living in a gorgeous flat, of course with a lovely girlfriend, the under-written Greta Gerwig. Her best friend Ellen Page, a flightly, neurotic sex kitten, arrives for a visit and Gerwig is terrified that she and her boyfriend will get together which of course they do. After a week of walking around the ruins of Rome and discussing higher arts Page sees herself as Stindberg’s Miss Julie they decide to elope.
Here Allen inserts a commentator on the action, Alec Baldwin’s architect who follows Eisenberg around making acidic comments on Page’s attempts to seduce him here comes the bullshit’. It’s an old technique and not entirely successful, despite Baldwin’s undeniable charm and wit.
Allen himself stars as the parent of an American girl (Alison Pill) who has fallen for a Roman lawyer. He and wife Judy Davis (also underwritten) fly to Rome to meet the parents, and Allen, a retired and bored music industry expert, discovers his new brother-in-law is a fantastic opera singer but only in the shower. He is determined to make a star of the man whatever it takes.
So far so Woody Allen note the professions are all lawyers and architects, living in fantastic flats in beautiful parts of the city and there are some chuckles amongst the angst. One thing Allen rarely does is social commentary, and here he has a go, with frankly embarrassing results. Roberto Benigni is a Joe Average, who suddenly finds himself a star when the media decide he is the most interesting man in Rome. He finds himself on breakfast TV telling the world he had toast with jam for breakfast, and wears white boxers. He is invited to film premieres and parties, and is at the centre of a media storm until the media decide to find someone else to fixate upon. It’s clearly a commentary on today’s consumerist celebrity-obsessed society, but it’s cloying and very, very unfunny.
The final story involves an Italian couple arriving from a small village to make their mark in Rome. She gets lost, finds herself on a film set and is seduced by the leading man, he has a hooker sent to his room, the great Penelope Cruz, who has to pretend to be his wife at a party full of stuffy businessman. Cruz gives it her all, relishing the part of a force of nature blowing away the cobwebs off the world’s most boring uncle and auntie.
Like the film as a whole, it’s engaging enough but never really goes anywhere, and the sun-drenched architecture and snappy one-liners start to pall over two hours.
Allen’s European tour has been patchy, with flashes of his old brilliance but, apart from the utterly charming Midnight In Paris, never really captured his old magic. From Rome With Love is almost a footnote to that set of projects, as he seems to have moved back to the US for his next project, also starring the excellent Baldwin. Perhaps its just as well although surely he has a film based in Vienna inside him?
Overall verdict: Inconsistent, patchy comedy with Allen at his best and worst, but with a great cast giving it their all, some lovely tourist photography and lots of references to opera, food and wine. It could almost have been sponsored by Alitalia.
Reviewer: Mike Martin