‘Rome’ fits Woody Allen’s relaxed late-career style
Published 3:02 pm Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Another year, another European capital: This is how Woody Allen’s career has been going lately, with mixed results. But in 2011 he scored his surprise hit “Midnight in Paris,” a casually charming movie with an unabashedly romantic view of the City of Light.
He’s in much the same mood for “To Rome With Love,” a sunny collection of stories set in the Eternal City. I’ve had my problems with Allen’s recent style, which tends to be so relaxed it barely qualifies as a first draft, but here the method looks effortless rather than lazy.
The stories don’t overlap; in fact, although they run along parallel lines, they exist in different timespans (one unfolds in a single day, another takes a period of weeks). The Woodman himself acts in one of the tales, as a bored retiree convinced he has discovered a great new opera tenor (who, alas, can hit his best notes only when singing in the shower).
In another strand, an ordinary man (Roberto Benigni, of “Life is Beautiful” renown) wakes up one day to find himself famous: The paparazzi are outside his door, TV talk shows want his opinions and beautiful women seduce him.
Why? He has no idea. Apparently in an era in which people become famous for being famous, it was just time for him to be famous for a while.
The most farcical episode has a young man (Alessandro Tiberi) forced to pass off a prostitute (Penelope Cruz) as his bride. Allen gets away with the one-joke nature of this bit because the bride (Alessandra Mastronardi) is having her own adventure, a flirtation with a movie star (the gloriously self-involved Antonio Albanese).
The final story is the most poignant. Architect Alec Baldwin returns to the Rome neighborhood he lived in as a young man, and there meets a young architect (“Social Network” star Jesse Eisenberg), who’s becoming attracted to the friend (Ellen Page) of his girlfriend (Greta Gerwig).
At first this situation appears realistic, but then the Baldwin character (in a way very similar to the ghostly Bogart in Allen’s “Play It Again, Sam”) continues to hang around, slipping advice to Eisenberg. Or is he gazing on his own youthful self, and re-living his romantic mistakes in Rome?
Whichever, there’s nothing earth-shaking about any of this, yet the movie casts a warm, amused glow around its foolish characters.
Allen and cinematographer Darius Khondji create a languid atmosphere, which means that when vaguely surreal or magical touches spring up, they somehow seem completely in the flow of things.
The sketches are not so far from the vein of “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex,” yet — 40 years after he made that movie — Allen’s approach is mellower and wiser, if not without a hint of vinegar.
Where in recent years Allen’s slackness has looked like indifference or haste, here it looks like the soft touch of a master. And what better place than Rome to survey the foibles of we foolish mortals, who build grand permanent plans that eventually turn into ruins?
“To Rome With Love” (3½ stars)
A sunny, amused look at some foolish mortals in the Eternal City, dreamed up by Woody Allen and offered with a touch of the surreal. The usual excellent cast is here (Alec Baldwin, Jess Eisenberg, Ellen Page and Allen himself), and Rome is the ideal place for Woody to spring his four separate tales of lovers at cross-purposes.
Rated: R for language.
Showing: Guild 45th.
