Alison Pill is a Pill or To Rome with Love

To Rome with Love is comprised of lots of little vignettes--let's see: there's an American tourist who meets an Italian man (named Michelangelo) while asking him for direction (what a romantic stereotype!), and then there's the American tourist's parents and the parents of the Italian man. There's also a couple who are moving to Rome just after they get married--the man stumbles upon a prostitute played by Penelope Cruz and has to pretend that she's his wife and the wife stumbles across an Italian actor who she has a crush on (he isn't even cute). The both end up (improbably) having affairs. There's also an architecture student and his girlfriend and her actress best friend and a weird ghost-of-Christmas-past character, played by Alec Baldwin, who's sort of there and sort of not. Baldwin warns the architect, a sort of younger version of himself (who he [improbably] meets on the street) against sleeping with the actress best friend. There's also a middle class Italian man, Roberto Benigni of Life is Beautiful, who becomes famous without knowing how. 

So you see, the movie is just loaded with improbable plot points (there's one horrendous moment after the wife of the just-married couple gets desperately lost trying to find a hair salon where she pulls out her cell phone and drops it into a grate--it's so buffoon-like and contrived). Also: everything in the movie is both fantasy and not fantasy. There's no explanation for why Benigni becomes famous and he has no idea. It's unclear how Baldwin keeps popping into scenes. And that's what I don't especially like about it. One reviewer notices the same things, but likes them more:

"One of the most delightful things about “To Rome With Love” is how casually it blends the plausible and the surreal, and how unabashedly it revels in pure silliness. The plots, which are cut together in no special order, obey different time schemes: Antonio and Milly’s marital drama (which involves a prostitute played by Penélope Cruz, and a movie star played by Antonio Albanese) seems to occupy a single afternoon, while other strands stretch over weeks and months."

The improbable plot points aren't helped out a lot by the fact that it's obvious that Woody Allen didn't rehearse the actors. I just don't think that only spontaneously recited lines are funny. 

And of course, some people take to that sort of acting better than others: For instance, Alison Pill is terribly unconvincing. Every time she says something, I'm reminded that I'm watching a movie and a not-very-good one at that. Roberto Benigni, on the other hand, is endearing and brilliant in any circumstances. I love his over-the-top physical comedy that just spills out of his incredulity and enthusiasm.

The vignettes are not connected by the characters intersecting with one another. There are connected by some mildly overlapping themes that run throughout the different stories. One is symbolized by the traffic conductor whose brief monologue introduces the play--people get lost and bump into each other. It's the surprise and unexpectedness of life. Another is the relationship between public and private (or maybe I'm just reading my dissertation back into this film). One of the characters can only sing in the shower (and he's quite good), so Woody Allen's character organizes an opera in which he gets wheeled onto the stage in a portable shower.* Benigni's seemingly reason-less fame also leads to the media asking him endless questions about his private life.

One further point: I don't think it's a good date movie, because it's full of cheating, and I don't know about you, but I find that uncomfortable.


*Woody Allen's wife in the movie, Judy Davis, reminds me a lot of Diane Keaton--wry and sarcastic and tall and dark haired.