Spotty But Worth It

Rating: 6/10 (25 September 2013)

Of the four disconnected story lines of 2RWL, the plot with the newlywed couple, the hooker and the movie star was completely dispensable, the plot with the shower singer was recycled early Allen shtick that could have been a sketch from Without Feathers 45 years ago, but the plot with Benigni's schmuck becoming a celebrity was enjoyable (and I never thought I'd want to see Benigni in anything ever again).
The film is worth seeing for the plot with Baldwin, Eisenberg and Page -- a good, cynical, mildly malicious meditation on the truth that the only real male erogenous zone is the ego. Page has the guts to play a thoroughly dislikable character with real zest, and Baldwin glides gracefully as the voice of rueful experience. Like an icon that shows a saint simultaneously at several stages of being, Baldwin is at once Eisenberg's real older contemporary, the inner voice of his better judgment, the omniscient narrator and the older, successful Eisenberg looking back on the young idiot he was.
Allen loves the theme of getting away with something -- murder in Crimes and Misdemeanors, Bullets over Broadway and Match Point, infidelity in Hanna and Her Sisters and Vicky Cristina. 2RWL has not one but three never detected infidelities, not to mention Benigni's more or less open dalliances that his bemused wife simply accepts as the perks of his bizarre celebrity.