Paris is better.

Rating: Null/10 (28 June 2012)

"If you stop a hundred Romans, they'll tell you: I could give you a million stories." Woody Allen's production notes
Rome has always been more hectic and less romantic than Paris to me but with equally competing foods and women. Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris is more romantic and humorous than To Rome with Love. The latter is flat by comparison, a picture post card of four vignettes rather than a short story with heft. After all, he opens it with Volare, hardly his usually sophisticated jazz and much too pop for a mature director/writer.
Although I loved seeing Woody as a retired, avant-garde producer of operas, grousing in his usual way about the world's annoyances such as airline discomfort, the rest of the story, which involves instances of Seventh Commandment violations along with the illusions of celebrity, is generally dull and will be unprofitable for the Woodman: "You're famous for being famous" is one person's answer to why the negligible Leopoldo (Roberto Benigni) is besieged by reporters. It's Woody's weak interpretation of a major theme. Oh, well.
With a writing Oscar for Midnight, Woody should have had better dialogue. Not to be. Yet even setups like the mortician who can sing glorious opera only when he is in the shower lead Woody to opera scenes that bore after the first splash of shower (the allusion to Woody's own successful staging of Puccini's Gianni Schicchi makes this sequence even more painful by contrast).
A minor delight is Alec Baldwin as John, an architect, who acts as a Greek chorus for a young Jack (Jesse Eisenberg) about to compromise his relationship with Sally (Greta Gerwig) for her friend, Monica (Ellen Page). John's ironic admonitions about Jack's foolishness (heard and seen at times by only Jack—think Bogart in Play It Again, Sam) are spot-on, e.g., calling Monica "a self-absorbed pseudo-intellectual." Not enough Baldwin, however, to save the film.
After all the infidelity the Eternal City induces on visitors and locals alike, the film becomes just postcards of famous places like the Trevi Fountain and The Spanish Steps, places that become a cliché like this film.