Review of To Rome with Love (2012) by Mike T — 02 Aug 2012

There were a handful of charming bits of cinematic magic that helped turn Woody Allen's last film Midnight in Paris into one of his best in years (and his most successful film in America, financially speaking, of all time). A love note to Paris of both the current age and of the roaring '20s, it was alive from start to finish with the pleasantly irresistible spirit of adoration, featuring a cast that seemed assembled to have fun foremost of all, with hewing close to historical reality a distant second. Allen's follow-up is similarly a mash-note to a city: To Rome with Love. Allen's personal love-life issues put to the side, it's hard to believe that an artist could love all European capitals equally, and fairly. Can Rome hang with Paris, when much of what made Paris work was an almost palpable adoration? To find out, we need to look at the secret weird heart of Midnight in Paris.

What made the film truly work (and Midnight in Paris is no simple film to get going, featuring as it does multiple time-travels and romantic entanglements) is Allen's insouciance about the fundamental plot mechanism at the heart of the film. The central character, played by Owen Wilson, is whisked back a hundred years in time not by some bolt of electricity hitting machinery, he just sits on some steps, and voila: time travel. It's a bit shaggy, but it's funny, the way the film casually disregards all of the generic rules of science fiction and just casually announces its own reality. It's what Woody Allen can do, still. One minute you're watching a dissembling nebbish talk about his romance troubles, the next, you're in a sci-fi movie, except there's no lasers, just Dali in a café, shouting. It's great.

That same casual redefinition of the rules of the game runs through the four stories that make up his follow-up, To Rome with Love, to varying extents. There's a bit of the magical in the story of Roberto Benigni's middle-class clerk who wakes up famous for no reason he can discern, and in the story of two young Americans (Jesse Eisenberg and Ellen Page) falling in love despite the protestations of a hovering ghostly architect (Alec Baldwin) who's seen that kind of thing before.

The ability to tinker with not much of a warning, hubbub or to-do with the narrative nature of his stories works fantastically well, turning small, familiar tales into original ones with the insertion of benign impossibilities like ghosts, fame and time travel. What's puzzling is that two of the stories in Midnight in Paris don't really do the same thing: while Allen's story of a reluctant opera singer and Penelope Cruz's helpful escort contain slapstick plotting, they lack the mildly shocking interventions that make the rest of the film work so well. Half of To Rome with Love seems to be inhabited by the same irreverence and passion that made Midnight in Paris so great, and the other half seems workaday, and ordinary, and uninspired. As a love note, it's limp - one gets a sense that Allen, in his heart of hearts, might not like Rome quite as much as Paris. While the cast is fun and the film occasionally inhabits the same weirdly wonderful suit of clothes that made Midnight in Paris work so well, it detours for half its length into slightly more mundane, slightly less love-struck territory, and is half as lovely as a result.