Neither terrible or great,, just wildly uneven

Rating: 5/10 (9 March 2013)

I haven't admittedly seen enough of Woody Allen's films to judge where To Rome with Love stands. Annie Hall, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Manhatten, Husbands and Wives and Hannah and Her Sisters I love, and Midnight in Paris was also hugely enjoyable. There are a number still though that I need to watch or re-watch, I remember liking but not loving Vicky Christina Barcellona and not liking Scoop at all but that might change on re-watch. I was left disappointed by To Rome with Love though, it is not as terrible as I've seen cited on IMDb as there were parts where I was entertained, but it wasn't really great either.
There are things I did like of To Rome with Love in general, before I get on to what was good and bad about the four segments. The film looks absolutely gorgeous, Rome is stunning and very like a character itself and the photography compliments it wonderfully. The soundtrack is infectious and hugely memorable, with a lot of zesty Italian flavour. Some of the acting is good also and there is one delightful but all too brief cameo, and the script does have its funny moments.
Much doesn't work though, the pacing is very uneven, some of it feels rushed and others too drawn out. While there are some funny parts, there are just as many awkward and clunky parts as well. Nothing really is that insightful or thought-provoking, there is the odd classic Woody Allen moment but at the end of the day it feels under-cooked. To me also, I found only one character that I came close to caring for. The four segments have good parts and bad parts, but on the most part they seem overlong, often with an interesting but thin concept that feels overstretched, and irrelevant to one another. If they were half as long I think they would have been effective.
For me the newlyweds storyline was the best one. Some of the most beautiful scenery of the film is in this segment, and there are some genuinely funny moments like the husband falling off the chair at the sight of his new wife with another man. The characters are not particularly well developed, you never know them well enough, but they are well played. Ornelia Muti makes a cameo, and it is delightful with her still looking great, but you do wish she had a bigger part. Penelope Cruz steals the show here, she is breathtakingly hot- she always was but I can swear she gets more and more so- and she plays the only character in To Rome With Love that comes across as likable as I liked how straightforward she was. Where the segment didn't work so well was the all-too-convenient ending and how it did feel at times like five different plots.
Close behind is the segment with Jesse Eisenberg and Alec Baldwin. The best part of this segment is Baldwin, the best lines go to him and he relishes them in a direct and very funny performance. Jesse Eisenberg is endearing and Ellen Page makes the most of her somewhat ironic role. Greta Gerwig is underused and doesn't have enough time to shine properly. Again there are some good moments and dialogue with Baldwin getting the best of it. But at the same time, Gerwig's dialogue sounds awkward too much, the segment later drags on for too long and ends on an underwhelmingly stupid note. I also wished that it expanded on Baldwin's character, I still don't get its significance or point in the story.
Woody Allen and the opera singer in the shower segment is in third place. The scenery is great, Judy Davis's(who is wonderful in this movie, third best actor in the film after Baldwin and Cruz) dialogue is highly amusing and Allen has some nice ones too(like the Imbecile line) and Fabio Armiliato has a wonderful voice. Allen himself has some good moments and lines, but often he does seem as though he's trying too hard. The man in the shower idea is very one-joke and silly, but in this film it was meant to be and for a vast majority of the time it was classic Woody Allen. As dragged out as it became though, it got increasingly ridiculous. The Pagliacci performance for instance was wonderfully ironic and did a good job of poking fun at badly done concept opera productions, but at the same time it did come too late and the practical problems of staging Pagliacci in that way were too numerous to ignore.
Roberto Benigni's story was the worst. And actually apart from a priceless line from the chauffeur and the lovely scenery and soundtrack, it was the only one that I didn't like at all. The story was just too contrived and thin with the much-overdue moral far too obvious, and Benigni in a very underwritten role comes across as too much of a clown, especially when he is in the road shouting his head off. The writing also was just lazy and unfunny. I understand completely that it was a story about somebody suddenly becoming famous and it certainly happens in real life. But while it is an everyday occurrence and had potential to be shown in a movie if written well, there was just nothing new or interesting about it, telling us things that we already know.
So all in all, not terrible or great, but uneven and disappointing. 5/10 Bethany Cox