First in a series: The Dawning of the Age of the ACA: Looking
askance at pop and political culture of 2011–now
Also fits this series:
“We’ll always have Woody”: A look at Woody Allen films
Subsections below:
A set of cross-cultural couples, with career comedy
A newlywed couple goes through comic shenanigans due to mistaken
identity or coincidences
An average man suddenly becomes a media-hounded celebrity
A young man teams up temporarily with a mentor, while the young man is
entranced by a dubious young woman
[Edit 12/20/14.]
At the end of Part 1, I made general comments about To Rome with Love that are useful for you to re-check here. (By the
way, the film’s Wikipedia article’s characterization of the whole film as in
the “magical realism” genre is not right; that applies to only one subplot, and
there debatably, as we’ll see.)
To Rome has a number of braided subplots, somewhat similarly to You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, but
here the number of subplots is greater (and the characters from the different
subplots here don’t interrelate between their groups, unlike in TDS). Also, the overall tone and style
of unfolding the story here are more cartoon-like, for relatively broad laughs,
and the pace is somewhat hectic. This apparently conforms with an aim of
Allen’s to make this seem like a light sort of Italian
love/average-person-caper movie. (In a supportive interview feature on the DVD—Con Amore: A Passion for Rome—it is
pointed out that the Italian films Allen loves include an irony, which he
apparently was trying to replicate here.)
The cinematography by Darius Khondji, who had worked with Allen a couple times before (in Anything Else [2003] and Midnight in Paris [2011]), seems to make
the film look flat and colorful, as if it’s for fun and not so much an
ambitiously artistic work.
Here are the subgroups of
characters with their subplots and vignettes:
A set of cross-cultural couples, with career comedy
A young American woman, Hayley
(Alison Pill, who played Zelda Fitzgerald
in Midnight in Paris), during a
summer vacation meets a young Italian lawyer on the street, Michelangelo (Flavio
Parenti [there is no full Wikipedia bio on him]), and they become an item. The
parents of both young people enter the plot: on her side, Jerry (Allen, in his
first onscreen appearance since Scoop
[2006]) and his wife Phyllis (Judy Davis, in her first work for Allen
since Husbands and Wives [1992] and Deconstructing Harry [1997] [and Celebrity (1998); pardon my learning curve]—and this
performance is her most low-key with him). They fly in to Italy, for a
vacation (he is retired, but chafing at the prospect) and to meet their
daughter’s boyfriend and his parents.
Michelangelo’s parents include Giancarlo
(Fabio Armiliato, who is an actual singer, a tenor—which explains how,
for an actor, if he’s not dubbed, he seems to sing awfully well). Giancarlo is
an undertaker/funeral home director (which allows Allen to make some
black-humor jokes, in line with his Jerry’s showing a passing, unoffending
“ugly American” side). Michelangelo’s mother has a fairly inconspicuous role,
and I can’t find the actress’s name in the film’s Wikipedia article. It turns
out that Giancarlo is a fine opera singer in the shower. Meanwhile, Allen’s Jerry
is retired from being a classical music producer for a record company, as well
as having staged operas (though with weirdly avant-garde touches like having
characters in one famed opera all dressed as “little white mice”). Jerry wants
to see if Giancarlo can get an audition for performances and maybe a record
contract.
This leads to some wacky comedy
regarding how this has to happen (because Giancarlo best sings only under
certain conditions). In the process, Allen and Davis make a sort of broad-comedy
couple where she, deadpan, skewers his passing pretensions somewhat on the
order of Jackie Gleason’s comedy (such as, when Gleason’s Ralph Kramden says,
“Alice, this is the biggest thing I ever got into!,” Alice retorts, “The
biggest thing you ever got into was your pants!”). With Allen’s one-liners,
this is one of the most effective comedy threads in the film.
Allen, amazingly, doesn’t
disappoint, though he does seem elderly. Here, he almost always has control of
his voice, unlike in Hollywood Ending
(2002), Anything Else (2003), or Scoop. For one thing, he seems personally
acclimatized to seeming (and being) old. In other films, he likes to refer to
Nietzsche once in a while; well, did you know Nietzsche wrote something like,
“Die at the right time” (according to a professor I had)? Either Nietzsche, or
Shakespeare in his “ages of man” mode, could also have said, “Every man
eventually, if he gets that old, starts to dress like an old man.” This most
reliably means that he has his pants up a little high, as if his waist rose
about four inches.
Allen is no exception to this.
And Allen typically favors pleated-front pants, and he was always slight of
build: so if his torso was a bit small when he was younger, it certainly looks
small now. This all conduces to him seeming like he’s among the many aged who
are on a schedule for pill-taking and need to be not far from a lavatory at all
times. His hair in this film seems to mix greyish-white with what has remained
of whatever red he had. His eyes are as dark as unburned charcoals, and peer
out from an otherwise sallow-ish, somewhat low-jawed face. (He always had a
face with somewhat long cheeks and a squared jaw; now, with age, this makes him
look more horse-faced than ever, which is compensated for a bit when his eyes
and talk convey a sparkle of fun.)
But even with a little
deliberateness to his starting to talk sometimes, he still manages to spin out surprising
one-liners that are among the funniest lines in the movie.
A newlywed couple goes through comic shenanigans due to mistaken
identity or coincidences
This film features a lot more
Italian dialogue in proportion to English than does Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) regarding the Spanish, so it seems
a large part of Allen’s deal in getting financing for To Rome was having it appear in, along with English-language
markets, an Italian market (with, as was likely with VCB, the subtitle-situation reversed for the different markets; so
with To Rome, for Italians the
English subtitles with the Italian talk are cut, and added are Italian
subtitles for the English talk). The Italian speaking in this film seems rather
voluminous (sometimes) for some of the English translations (though it isn’t
like Godzilla films, with the seeming
ratio of 60 Japanese syllables to five English syllables). How Allen presented
his Italian actors scripts isn’t clear, but his sister Letty Aronson on the Con
Amore extra says that though Allen doesn’t know Italian, he knew during
filming when an Italian scene was right, and he turned out to be right when
Italian viewers loved the scenes.
The newlywed couple’s story is
somewhat more low-key comedy than Allen has going on in the English-language
parts, but it is charming enough (and according to the Wikipedia article on To Rome, it is based on Fellini’s The White Sheik [1952]). A young man,
Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi [no Wikipedia bio available]), and a young woman,
Milly (Alessandra Mastronardi), have just
gotten married, and they are in an apparent honeymoon hotel suite. Milly goes
out on some excursion, and as Antonio waits in his room, a call girl, Anna
(Penélope Cruz), shows up, thinking he is
someone else she has been appointed to service (by some others; possibly it’s a
business matter).
Antonio first tries to assure her
of her mistake; then, wildly, some relatives of his charge in, apparently
expecting to meet the newlywed couple there. Thinking fast, Antonio and Anna
pretend they are the newlyweds; Anna
even remonstrates with the newly arrived people for barging in, etc. The older
people leave. Then Antonio anguishes: what does he do now? He and his wife are
invited to dine with the older people, and he must pretend Anna is his wife for
the time being.
Meanwhile, Milly, the real young
wife, loses her cell phone in trying to call Antonio, then ends up in a random
situation on the street where she meets a movie crew, with actors, doing some
filming. She is star-struck, and eventually gets into a situation where she is
trying to date one of the actors, Luchino Salta (Antonio Albanese). This occurs in parallel to Antonio’s carrying
on the charade with Anna, including his finding Milly with Luchino Salta at the
same restaurant (while Milly doesn’t know Antonio, with Anna, is there).
Antonio and Milly’s farcical
situation plays out so that the couple eventually gets back together, in one of
the most “happy endings” to any of the comic odysseys/subplots within this
film.
An average man suddenly becomes a media-hounded celebrity
Perhaps what could be called the
“most expendable piece of cheap cheese to this sandwich” of a multi-plot film
is the subplot where Leopoldo Pisanello (Roberto Benigni), an office worker, suddenly becomes followed by
the media as if he is a major star, completely out of the blue. Leonard
Maltin’s compendium refers to this as if it were a bit of magical realism, such
as Allen tried with Midnight in Paris;
and this isn’t an implausible interpretation, but I think that for a better
explanation in line with Allen’s longer-range aims, we need to see how this
subplot echoes Allen’s Celebrity
(1998), which I haven’t opted to see.
In any event, I find this
subplot a bit tired—it’s amusing in places, but rather like filler. Benigni
(who starred in Life Is Beautiful [1997],
to acclaim, though the film was controversial) makes a game effort at
enlivening his character here. Leopoldo first becomes beleaguered by being
treated by a star, then goes along with it to an extent, then when it ends as
inexplicably as it began, he starts to miss it. This is also an
Italian-language subplot.
A young man teams up temporarily with a mentor, while the young man is
entranced by a dubious young woman
In the John/Jack/Monica subplot,
Allen is repeating something of the plot of Anything
Else, and this subplot would be the one that young filmgoers—especially the
Allen haters—might most object to. This is actually the subplot with the most
American-type humor next to the singing-undertaker subplot featuring Allen, and
it, in general, exemplifies the kind of doctrinaire, barbed satire of morés of
the young that Allen has carved out for himself as an option for his films
since the 1990s. If it seems to embody a kind of prepackaged cynicism, it still
ends up pretty entertaining for its jokes (appreciated with suspension of
offense at the arguable cynicism); and it seems to carry the inevitable charm
that does the longer tradition (back to about 1977) of Allen’s stories of “the
young and in love in the city, where they are all about their aims for the
future and at a pass in life where they are most apt to be sold down the
river.”
Added to this situation is Alec Baldwin, as an architect (John [Voigt?]) visiting
the city, almost literally bumping into a young architecture student, Jack, played
by Jesse Eisenberg. Baldwin’s John has
parted from his peer-age company to go seek out his old haunts when he lived in
Rome 30 years before, in his youth. Jack invites him to walk along—he’ll show
him where X street is—and then invites him into his flat for coffee.
There is Jack’s fiancée Sally
(Greta Gerwig), and as it happens, they
are going to pick up Monica (Ellen Page)
at the airport. Monica is a film actress, who is currently out of work and has
just broken up with her boyfriend. Sally assures Jack that Monica is fun—“Wait
till you meet her,” that sort of thing. Baldwin’s John smells a rat; then he
becomes a sort of slyly commenting mentor, speaking to Jack at turns in the
conversations (through the rest of the subplot) almost as if Jack is the only
one who can hear him.
Throughout, John comments with
deliciously subversive humor at what a shaky proposition for Jack Monica will
be, and later is. At first, Jack assures John that he will not be won over by Monica’s
charms, etc. (this is almost a “meta” exercise of two people wanting, from
their different angles, to evade the quicksand of a typical Woody Allen dangerous-romance
plot). But then, slowly but steadily, Monica wins Jack over, not least with her
talk about her colorful sexual history (a monologue Page does on this is
fascinating), her issuing cultural allusions at a café table, her rhapsodizing
about points of her interest in whatever they see around the city, etc.
Baldwin’s John, apparently in
reaction to his own illusions-banishing experience as a youth, reads Monica as
the sort of pretentious con artist that binds a guy like Jack as if Jack can
only see her as a winning delight, leading him sadly to shuck aside Sally in
the process, while dangers to him lie ahead.
There are a lot of parallels
here—in the old skeptic trying to warn a young man away from a dubious young
woman—to what we have seen in Anything
Else. But what adds to the humor here is that Baldwin utters his comments—amid
a full array of whoever else being present, including the woman he’s talking
about—with the sort of self-consciously sardonic attitude he shows in the Capital
One TV commercials he used to be in, and this actually works to deliver the
humor. But you sometimes wonder what the young woman or women who are also
present in the scene think of him and his continual crusade to puncture
illusions. At one point Monica seems to break through the artistic artifice to
say to John with a mild attempt at being withering, “You don’t understand
women,” and Baldwin responds without missing a beat, “That’s been proven.” An
anticlimactic step, but underscoring Allen’s firmly tooled satire.
In Con Amore, which has an interview with not only Allen’s sister
Letty Aronson but also Baldwin, Baldwin says that Allen let him improvise some
of his lines, as seemed suitable within the scene. This may have been what
makes Baldwin seem like such a version of his
conspicuously ironic self here.
The whole Jack/Monica subplot
seems to unfold pretty well; and how it ends (quite helpful to Jack’s and Sally’s
relationship) is very amusing, with Monica (as she’s told in a phone call) getting
a movie contract for work on just the kind of dopey-audience, high-budget
Hollywood film that Allen has been comfortably eschewing for 40+ years; with
Monica’s turn of fortune, Allen gets to skewer both commercial Hollywood and
his conception of a flake kind of female. In reporting to Jack on the phone
call, Monica mentions, perfectly oblivious to the morality, that she is
comfortable with the roué director of the prospective film, in terms of doing
required nude scenes for him; and she also loves his druggie personality style.
Baldwin’s John watches her rhapsodizing with his face vivid with “like I
thought!” skepticism.
This subplot also involves
evocative Italian locations, but viewers might find that it, of all the
subplots here, is the most cynical train of writing in a film that otherwise
seems as if meant for simple fun time-killing. For a variety of viewers, satire
can best appeal depending on its targets (for those who are more appealed to by
specific content), or (for those who like any
satire) if the general craft of its humor is good. Even if we tolerate its selection
of targets (that is, if we “bracket out” that its targeting may be unfair), it
can still be like good Scotch or Led Zeppelin—it can be the best of its kind
there is, but you don’t always have a taste (or the mood) for it.
##
Visually, this is very much one
of Allen’s European “travelogue” films, where you feel you are on a
mini-vacation with the photography of must-see sights, as with Midnight in Paris or Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
Adding to the mishmash quality
of To Rome, Allen even has a narrator
do some work, but he only appears at the very beginning and the very end. He is
played—as a traffic cop—by a real traffic cop in Rome, Pierluigi
Marchionne.
