A Messy Dish, Good Laughs on the Side

If Woody Allen’s “To Rome with Love” was an Italian restaurant dish, it would be a mélange of every leftover in the chef’s refrigerator. But it’s a movie, and Allen has dumped story ideas, time, characters, cinematic styles, most of his own neurotic tics and tropes and a gaggle of actors into a film that wanders around the city looking for cohesion and meaning, which it never finds. Allen, who decamped from the United States several films ago, has since set stories and locations in London, Barcelona and now Rome, all the while continuing his film-a-year output. He famously told the Observer in 2004 that he doubted he would ever again make a great movie: “If I keep working, I think it’s possible I could do a great movie some day by accident.” “Match Point” came close; “Midnight in Paris,” for all its charm, was not really very good. “Rome” is just plain awful. But, paradoxically, it is often very funny.“Rome” tells four stories that crisscross the city’s beautiful scenery but never intersect. In fact each is on its own time line: one takes place in a single day, others over days or maybe even weeks. An American couple (Allen and Judy Davis) arrive in Rome to meet the parents of their daughter’s fiancé. The father, a mortician (famed tenor Fabio Armiliato), has a fabulous operatic voice; but he can only sing in the shower while soaping himself. (Allen’s character, a retired classical music producer, becomes obsessed with getting the reluctant, shower-bound Armiliato before the public. You can guess where this story line is going.) Then there is a couple of newlyweds from the provinces (Alessandro Tiberi and Alessandra Mastronardi) who get themselves sexually involved, separately, with a prostitute (a ravishing Penelope Cruz) and a movie star (Antonio Albanese, bald and barrel-chested). Meanwhile, John, a visiting American architect (Alec Baldwin, puffy but suave), meets a younger version of himself (Jesse Eisenberg) and counsels him — only Eisenberg can hear him, so maybe he’s in Eisenberg’s subconscious (after all this is a Woody Allen film) — against bad romantic decisions that involve his girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) and her visiting best friend, an actress and serial seducer (Ellen Page, seriously miscast.) Finally an ordinary guy, a nebbish, really (Roberto Benigni), emerges from his house into a swarm of reporters and finds, contra Kafka, that he has suddenly become the best known celebrity in Italy. When he asks why, he is told he is “famous for being famous.” Benigni’s character, at first horrified by the adulation, is dumbfounded when it shifts, just as suddenly, to someone else. In a final embarrassment, Begnini is made to have a meltdown in the middle of an avenue as he begs people to remember that he was once famous. Allen has given himself and Baldwin the funniest lines. Of course Allen centers on the aging, retired music executive’s need to keep doing something (his wife says “You equate retirement with death”), and his squeamishness at dealing with a mortician. Baldwin’s frequent comments on the Page character’s manipulation of the willing Eisenberg, “She knows one line from every poet, just enough to fake it,” might as well refer to the film itself. For faking it is what Allen is doing in “Rome.” After all, he once said that “80 percent of success is just showing up.” While there is more than one idea here that might have made a decent film, even a good one, “Rome” feels and plays like a rough draft that needed extensive editing and rewriting. But maybe on Allen’s frantic one-a-year schedule and obvious race with age, he didn’t have the time. At least there is Rome to look at. And that is not a bad thing at all.“To Rome with Love” will open at The Moviehouse in Millerton, NY, and elsewhere in these parts, Friday, July 6. The film is rated R for some sexual references.