The Bloom is Off the Rose

Rating: 3/10 (23 June 2012)

"To Rome with Love" comes off as a series of short stories written by a middle school student, lacking any logic and possessing the sexual maturity of a thirteen year old boy. Employing the "bigger is better" approach, Woody Allen takes the device he used in the far more successful "Midnight in Paris" of a nebbish character swept up in an unexplained fantasy and cranks out a series of nonsensical vignettes depicting nebbish characters in unexplained fantasies, replacing the impressive vistas of Paris for the impressive vistas of Rome. There are a few laughs along the way, but Allen spreads himself so thin that he is unable to provide his universe with any depth or reality and tries to get by on the audience's familiarity with his work and the faded idea that whatever he puts on screen represents quality.
The most successful episode features Alec Baldwin as a world-weary architect who makes a sentimental journey to the street he lived on as a student and encounters young Jesse Eisenberg now in residence and living out a romantic entanglement that Baldwin pops in and out of to provide jaded insight. This sequence at least offers some actual emotion for the audience to connect with (largely due to the fine acting of Baldwin, Eisenberg and Ellen Page as a sexy but neurotic actress steeped in Allen's signature pseudo intellectuality) but is so confused about Baldwin's presence that the audience is unclear if he is simply the person he is presented as, if Eisenberg is his younger self who he has come back to mentor, or if it is some bizarre "Twilight Zone" scenario that is never fully resolved. Even when he is in the room with the characters Eisenberg is interacting with, no one makes any reference to Baldwin and no one except Eisenberg can seem to hear what Baldwin is saying (the few times when the other characters do respond to Baldwin only make it more confusing when they don't). Yet this peculiar relationship is never explained and seems a product of Allen's sloppy writing rather than mysterious forces at work.
The rest of the vignettes are just lazy, implausible nonsense whose outrageousness is forced and seems planted there to make up for any genuine wit. The most tiresome sequence is Roberto Begnini as a mundane worker bee who inexplicably wakes up to find himself the most famous man in the world. It's a one-joke premise that goes on for far too long, and since Begnini's boring drone doesn't get any more interesting as a result of what he's experienced, neither does the story. A young couple on their honeymoon are parted just as they are about to meet some people who are important to their future, and the husband implausibly substitutes prostitute Penélope Cruz for his absent wife. The newlyweds end up throwing aside the marriage vows that they just took in an alarming display of Allen's sexual immaturity. And Allen himself makes an appearance as a frustrated opera director who discovers a major talent who can only show off his gifts in the shower, in yet another one-joke misfire.
It is sad that after a long stretch of sub-par work and redeeming himself with some quality films like "Midnight in Paris" and "Match Point" that Allen is content to present a lazy effort like "To Rome with Love" which is so derivative of his "early, funny films" without any of the freshness or inventiveness. If you're looking for something to do this weekend, I recommend popping "Annie Hall" into the DVD player and giving this one a pass.