Woody Allen Redux-To Rome With Love (2012)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sandy Salmon

To Rome With Love, starring Woody Allen, Alex Baldwin, Penolope Cruz, 2012

I really believe, and after watching this film under review Woody Allen’s 2012 filmed in Rome To Rome With Love I believe I have additional ammunition, that once Woody got away from his roots in New York City, hell, from Manhattan, the quality of his work overall fell off. Maybe it was that quintessential Jewish nerdish comedian raised among the high rises and absorbing the culture of the Jewish quarter, the city and maybe Coney Island in the 1940s that left its mark on him. And was not transferable. He certainly flaunted it in great NYC- based movies like Manhattan.    

Other towns from LA to Barcelona and here Rome leave me with very mixed feelings about his filming in other locales. (Although Midnight In Paris worked it depended on the heavyweight fantasy figures of Hemingway and his crowd in Jazz Age Paris times to carry the thing off.) This despite the fact that he, a funny man almost without talking, was in the film after an absence of some years.

Rome might be a great locale for love but to hitch four basically unrelated stories together to fill up a script seemed disjoined and unwieldy. The four: a standard boy meets girl story; an average Joe waking up to celebrity; a young rural couple lost in the big city, and; a trip down memory lane (by Alex Baldwin) in a semi-fantastic setting don’t seem to have much to hold the whole production together. Too bad Woody but I guess not every effort can reach Annie Hall or a slew of others that made a poor gentile boy from the suburbs laugh, laugh hard.