Wrong place, wrong time

Rating: Null/10 (28 September 2013)

Woody Allen's best film in many years, Midnight in Paris, wasn't really about a great city, it was about the dream of a great city, one seen through the eyes of a perennial college student turned screenwriter whose read the all the books on the reading list, and has had the usual pre-programmed insights. The charm of it is that Woody, now in his late seventies but still the eternal NYU sophomore, can laugh at himself and all his literary pretensions. The trouble with To Rome with Love, however, is that it is not a dream film, but one that pretends to have some deeper insight into the intertwining lives of American living in Rome and their Italian counterparts, but, sad to say, there is no depth whatsoever. Woody is apparently incapable of observing the real world anymore, other than through the double-glazed windows of a 5 star hotel, and if he goes down into the streets, as this film forces him to do, all he seems capable of doing is looking around quickly, buying a few picture postcards, and recycling old Italian films. One of the four plots of this film, the young couple from the Italian provinces, is an embarrassing rip-off of the plot of one of Fellini's earliest films, the 1952 Lo Sceicco Bianco (The White Sheik). If it is meant as a homage to a fellow director, it is a shallow one indeed. The young American actors, fine as they are, are asked to play very tedious characters. They all seem like graduate students trying too hard to learn about life and failing. As for the others, Penelope Cruz is busty and sexy—not much of a stretch--and Robert Begnini underplays a one-joke idea about celebrity, which he does, surprisingly, without his usual zaniness. (That's like casting Jerry Lewis as Prospero.) Judi Davis, of all people, has somehow inherited the part of the typically castrating New York wife, a character who surfaces in many of Allen's films; she's an odd combination of two of the women in Woody's life: Diane Keaton in her quirkiness and Louse Lasser in her kvetchiness. (A remarkable feat for an Aussie, I might add.) Woody himself wanders in and out of his own film, as if he is the wrong place at the wrong time. The Bob Hope jokes and wisecracks, once his trademark, now fall flat. He plays an old man, but he is an old man, all the zest that once was so charming is gone. This is a very bad film from a great director. Perhaps it's time for Woody to stop making one film and year.