Movie Review: "To Rome With Love"

Marilyn and I wasted no time this weekend taking in the newest movie by Woody Allen, "To Rome With Love".  This one follows Woody's recent trend of filming on location in different European cities (London, Barcelona, and Paris), and, as with those other locations, this movie wants to make you immediately board a plane and visit Rome.  Really, having Woody Allen make a movie in your city has to be the greatest thing that could happen to a Chamber of Commerce.  Rome looks positively beautiful in this movie.


Anyway, this one involves four separate stories taking place concurrently in the Eternal City:

• Woody (actually appearing in one of his movies for the first time in several years) and his wife (Judy Davis, a vet of several Allen movies) traveling to Rome to meet their daughter's fiance and his family.
• An ordinary Italian citizen (Roberto Benigni) suddenly, inexplicably finds that he is a huge celebrity, famous for being famous.
• An older, famous architect (Alec Baldwin) becomes a Greek Chorus of sorts to a young architect (Jesse Eisenberg) who is experiencing some romantic entanglements with his girlfriend and her visiting friend (Greta Gerwig and Ellen Page).
• A young Italian couple in Rome on their honeymoon become separated and become involved with a sexy Italian male movie star and a high priced call girl (Penelope Cruz).  Don't ask how this all comes about.

The four stories are not interrelated, but each tells a separate tale in typical Woody fashion.  Nice to see Allen, now an old man, back on screen playing the "Woody Allen" persona with which fans are familiar.  And we even get a bonus in that area, since Eisenberg also plays the "Woody Allen-part" in this movie.  All the characters are great, but I especially liked the roles played by Allen, Davis, Baldwin, and Cruz, and they are great in them.

In his later years, Allen seems to be taking a more positive tone in the stories he tells, and each of the four stories told here end on an upbeat and positive note.  There a lot of laughs in this one, and we liked it a lot.

One word of warning: about half of this movie is spoken in Italian with English sub-titles, so be prepared for that.