To Rome with Love

Woody Allen – 2012 – USA

I always see and mostly enjoy Woody Allen’s movies, but I can’t deny that something about them gives me the creeps, especially in this post-scandal, international phase he’s been in for the last decade or so.  His whimsical conceits are cute, even daring, but I wonder if we’d really tolerate them in the films of a lesser-known filmmaker.  Thankfully, he seems to have gotten past his sad need to portray himself with 20-ish girlfriends in every film to show us how normal it is.  But principally it’s his unbending focus on affluent, self-absorbed WASPs that annoys me; the kind of people forever dressed in neutral beiges and able to live in Europe for a year while deciding if they want to paint, write a novel or simply marry a comparably rich and good-looking mate.  Remember the split-screen scenes in Annie Hall (1977) that contrasted Allen’s childhood dinner table, with all its raucous, working-class ethnicity, and Diane Keaton’s genteel WASP family?  I always hoped that his stories would turn towards the former instead of the latter.  Allen’s almost pathological dismissal of his roots is truly unfortunate, in my opinion, because it robs his films of heart and a common touch that could certainly have benefitted them.  He has never quit dreaming of acceptance by the same people who loved his hero, the forlorn Scandinavian Ingmar Bergman; intellectuals and trendy nihilists whom I imagine wearing 70s-style turtlenecks and sports-jackets while attending film festivals.  Well anyway, To Rome with Love is fine, with plenty going for it.  Allen fans won’t likely be disappointed, especially if you enjoyed his recent films like You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) and Midnight in Paris (2011), in which actors always seem to be impersonating Allen himself in various stages of his neurotic life.  Several stories that never intertwine are told, some romantic, some surreal, all taking place in the Eternal City.  I liked the story featuring Allen’s character discovering a great opera singer who can only seem to perform in the shower.  His solution: bring the shower stall right onto the stage.  That’s the kind of wacky comic genius that is sorely missing from Allen’s Bergmanesque movies.  It was nice to Judy Davis too, even if she doesn’t do much except the same lovingly-disparaging- wife-of-Allen’s-character routine that has been done variously over the years by Diane Keaton, Julie Kavner, Goldie Hawn and Tracey Ullman.