Cine Me

To Rome With Love

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1859650/

To Rome with Love is light and fast, with some of the sharpest dialogue and acting that he's put on the screen in years.

 

This is the vital city that inspired Fellini – alive and lived in. When an actor falters or a joke falls flat, Roma stays fresh and dynamic. You can't take your eyes off it.

We see different stories through out the film. Some show aspects of the Italian lifestyle and culture, presented from a beautiful Rome; that city that Allen wants to present to us, his Rome. But other stories present again the issues that have been important to him, those problems that for centuries have raised for humankind: love, infidelity, death, success, fame, happiness; those issues that Allen simply loves to discuss.

The cast is charming and I want to highlight a sincere Roberto Benigni; Jesse Eisenberg, that resembles perfectly the young Woody Allen; and the beautiful and talented Ellen Page, with a powerful character that makes you impossible not to fall in love with her.

I have the huge bias of been a Woody Allen fan and that is probably why I enjoyed so much this movie. It is thrilling to see him acting again. See all that neurosis again in the big screen. This movie surprises, can be as surreal as Buñuel would be and also as real as Allen is with daily problematics.

 

It’s a traffic jam of epic proportions.

And it isn’t just the story, which involves four main threads and numerous sub-threads. The movie also is crowded with characters standing in for Allen, a director who’s famous for casting surrogates -- actors who impersonate the director’s famous neurotic-intellectual tics (see Owen Wilson in “Midnight in Paris,” Kenneth Branagh in “Celebrity,” among others).

The battling Wood-bots include Jesse Eisenberg’s stammering, romantically confused American architecture student; Roberto Benigni’s Italian schlemiel who wakes up one morning to discover that he’s famous for absolutely no reason; and Alessandro Tiberi as a nervous young newlywed from the Italian boondocks who wears oversize shirts buttoned up to the neck, yet who nevertheless winds up fighting off a preposterously gorgeous Roman prostitute (Penelope Cruz) in a case of mistaken identity.

Allen himself makes his first on-camera appearance since 2006’s “Scoop,” playing a former opera director who discovers an undertaker (Fabio Armiliato) with an astounding voice that manifests itself only when he’s in the shower. Of course, this leads to an extended sequence of a naked, soaped-up man in a portable shower stall, performing “Pagliacci” in front of perplexed classical-music fans.

It’s the low point of the film.
Somewhere in here is a real movie, but it’s hard to find in all the mess (which, despite everything, is actually funny from time to time). The best of the many subplots involves Eisenberg’s Jack, a nebbish torn between his live-in girlfriend, Sally (Greta Gerwig), and her visiting best friend, Monica (Ellen Page). Never mind that Page -- who looks like a 13-year-old boy -- is woefully miscast as a sexpot Hollywood actress. The story works for one reason, and one reason only: Alec Baldwin as John, a middle-age architect who once lived in the same Roman apartment that Jack and Sally now occupy.
As John, Baldwin keeps showing up, incongruously, in scenes involving Jack, Sally and Monica. Only Jack and Monica seem to be able to see him, as he offers unsolicited -- and generally disregarded -- romantic advice with the aplomb of an invisible Jack Donaghy. Baldwin also delivers some of the best lines. Otherwise, “Rome” is a little too peppered with one-liners for its own good.
“Is someone dead?” the undertaker asks Allen’s Jerry, when they meet. “No,” Jerry answers, “but it’s early.”
Unfortunately, this promising story line -- which suggests a comic take on how the young must make their own mistakes -- is anemic and underdeveloped. How could it not be? There’s no room for it to grow, with precious screen time eaten up by all the other labored, arch dialogue spoken -- ever so haltingly -- by the movie’s various Woody wannabes.
Then there’s the Roberto Benigni narrative, whose entire point seems to be that fame is better than anonymity. It’s difficult to imagine that Allen believes that, even for a second. What he does seem to believe in is keeping busy, even if it means spinning his wheels.
Coming so soon after the director’s delightful excursion to “Paris” last year, “To Rome With Love” is a giant disappointment. It’s as bustling as its titular city’s piazzas, but it goes nowhere.