Treading Water

Rating: 5/10 (26 January 2013)

After Woody Allen's surprisingly deft script for 'Midnight in Paris' many had high hopes for 'To Rome With Love' despite its title indicating a retread. Well, a retread would have been more welcome than this meandering, unformed, and undisciplined collection of predictable vignettes.
I won't belabor the mini-plots as a few hundred people have done that already. I'll just point out that a couple of them--starring Roberto Benigni and Fabio Armiliato--are themselves belabored well past the threshold of intolerance. Why? Because each vignette has just one joke behind it and could have been entertaining for five minutes. Not twenty. (At least Armiliato does have a good singing voice.)
Allen, as he never tires of reminding us, adheres to Nietzsche's 'Great Man' theory, wherein mere mortals should hope at most to bask in reflected glory of the Superman, never to question him. And the Superman never follows the rules which apply to lesser mortals. But someone needs to tell Mr Konigsberg that his jokes are inevitably overextended and many fall completely flat. Alas, like most self-styled supermen he appears to have no one around who dares to be honest with him.
Even Woody's visual tribute to 'Roma La Bellissima' falls somewhat flat despite the visual pr0n on display. He consistently selects locales which would have been clichéd and tiresome to an American tourist in 1960. Spanish Steps? Are you serious? I wonder if he knows the city at all.
The film (as so many of his are) is actually a more transparent paean to adultery. In Woody's world, cheating on your lover is a productive, life-affirming, transformative act which improves your life in almost every way. Even your betrayed partner will be delighted at the new you! Woody? This is called self-justification, and you never tire of it. If only the rest of us could say the same.