Probably any Woody Allen project coming after the much loved and stupidly profitable Midnight in Paris was going to be a disappointment. Especially a movie that was marketed as being something of an addendum to Midnight in Paris like To Rome With Love (whose title was changed from Nero Fiddled at the last moment) was. But nothing prepared me for just how disappointing To Rome With Love ended up being. Here Allen is telling four intertwined stories detailing the lives of a handful of people who all reside in the city of Rome. There’s the newly engaged couple whose parents are meeting for the first time, the aging architect who’s visiting the neighborhood he lived in years ago, the young couple who came to the city to build a new life but end up getting separated, and the everyday man who suddenly finds himself the subject of tabloid fame.
Each plot thread feels like a half-baked story that couldn’t quite cut it as a feature on its own, so they got shoved together with the rest in order to make up this messy anthology. Thematically the tales are connected in that they all explore fame and the question of whether it’s better to be happy with a simple life or to always be seeking something better, but in the end the thematic glue doesn’t end up being sticky enough to hold it all together, and what you get feels like a messy collage that your four-year-old gives you and you hang on the fridge out of pity.
Of course, any movie that boasts a cast with names like Alec Baldwin, Jesse Eisenberg, Alison Pill, Greta Gerwig, Penélope Cruz, Ellen Page, a bunch of Italian people whose names I’m not familiar with, and Allen himself has its moments, and To Rome With Love definitely provides a handful of laughs; but there’s such a stretch of time between them that you can’t help but get bored. And by the time the film is over, the two songs that make up the soundtrack will be so engrained in your head that you won’t be certain whether you just saw a real movie or instead experienced some sort of advanced form of psychological torture.
