REVIEW: To Rome With Love

To Rome With Love (2012): Written and directed by: Woody Allen. Starring: Woody Allen, Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Penélope Cruz, Judy Davis, Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig, Alessandra Mastronardi, Ellen Page and Alessandro Tiberi. Rated R (Various infidelities). Running time: 121 minutes.

 2 stars (out of four)

Woody Allen’s tour of Europe continues with To Rome With Love, a collection of vignettes about tourists and locals in Rome that feels less like a love letter to the city than a justification for Woody’s traveling. The film, though not without its amusing moments, is an awkward jumble of comic sketches that fail to add up to a cohesive whole.

We meet Hayley (Alison Pill), a New Yorker on holiday for the summer, who asks for directions from Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti), a dashing Roman. After no time at all (more specifically, after a brief sight-seeing montage), the two are engaged and arrange a meeting of the future in-laws. Mr. Allen himself returns to acting playing his usual crotchety self and delivering some stale one-liners as Jerry, Hayley’s father.

Jerry is a retired classical music producer and when he overhears Michelangelo’s father (opera singer Fabio Armiliato) belting in the shower, he insists the man has a gift that must be shared with the world. This idea is met with sarcastic scorn from Jerry’s wife (Judy Davis) who shrewdly observes Jerry is simply bored and looking for an opportunity to relive the glory days. This storyline eventually peters out into a one-joke bit that is worth a chuckle the first time you see it but quickly gets old.

A characteristically animated Roberto Benigni stars in a similarly one-note story as an everyday joe who inexplicably becomes a national celebrity overnight. Paparazzi mob him outside his home: “What did you eat for breakfast?” they ask him in an excited commotion. “Do you take your bread toasted or untoasted?” And so on, and so on.

In another episode, a newlywed couple, Milly (Alessandra Mastronardi) and Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi), get separated and subsequently embark on parallel sexual indiscretions; Milly with a movie star (Antonio Albanese) and Antonio with prostitute (a criminally underused Penélope Cruz). Their stories meander for a while in mildly farcical territory but don’t really go anywhere.

The only narrative that does progress and develop an actual arc features Jesse Eisenberg as Jack, a young architect living in Rome with his girlfriend Sally (a barely seen Greta Gerwig). Sally has invited her best friend Monica (Ellen Page), a notorious seductress, to stay over their place and visit. “Don’t fall in love with her,” she tells Jack, which is really another way of saying, “You’re going to fall in love with her.”

Eavesdropping on the developing love triangle is John (Alec Baldwin), a famed architect Jack recognizes on the street and invites to his apartment. John, as it turns out, once lived on this very block when he was Jack’s age. Indeed, Jack may even be a young incarnation of himself. (Or is John a future incarnation of Jack?) At any rate, Woody Allen has fun letting John stroll in and out of scenes like a one-man Greek chorus in Jack’s mind, warning him of the trouble he is about to get into while also conceding the inevitable. He was young once too and easily tempted by charming girls like Monica.

Jesse Eisenberg and Ellen Page are well suited to the fast-talking neuroses of Mr. Allen’s characters and though their dialogue is far from Mr. Allen’s best writing, the pair have a way of making their lines sound snappier than they actually are. This is Woody Allen Lite (he has crafted much more subtle and interesting tales of infidelity in the past) but it is still the best offering here.

The title of this movie is curious. Woody Allen’s last film, Midnight in Paris, told an enchanting story set in the City of Lights that also found plenty of time to indulge in the scenery. It evoked the magic of the city (literally) as well as Mr. Allen’s adoration of it. To Rome With Love feels obligatory. Often Woody Allen seems to be padding for time and he overwrites a lot of scenes, beating a joke into the ground or, worse, explaining why it’s funny. I’ve never been to Rome but I imagine it deserves better.

- Steve Avigliano, 7/9/12

REVIEW: Inception

Inception (2010): Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy and Michael Caine. Rated PG-13 (sequences of violence and action throughout). Running time: 148 minutes.

3 ½ stars (out of four)

If you had something to hide – a secret, personal demons – to what length would you go to protect it? In Inception, the new mind-bending thriller from The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan, there’s a guy who keeps a vault inside an arctic fortress protected by soldiers armed with sniper rifles and grenade launchers. And those are just for his daddy issues.

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an “extractor.” He has the ability to enter people’s minds through their dreams and once inside, steal whatever secrets they may be hiding. For each theft, an “architect” develops a blueprint dream world, one that the dreamer fills in with personal details and populates with projections of people from his own memory. Much like a dream, not until waking up does the person realize it’s all an illusion, if he realizes at all. Whether Cobb is the developer of the technique or simply an independent contractor isn’t entirely clear in the film, but we know he’s the best at what he does.

A businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) approaches him with a special job. He wants to convince a competitor’s son (Cillian Murphy) to make some ill-advised business decisions in the wake of his father’s death. In order to do this, Saito enlists Cobb and his men on an “inception” job, which you may have guessed from the change in prefix is the opposite of extraction. Rather than stealing something, he wants Cobb to plant an idea inside the young entrepreneur’s head and convince him that that idea is his own. To perform inception without the person realizing is a task many say is impossible, but Cobb takes on the job regardless because, well, he’s the best.

Filling out the rest of the team are Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Cobb’s right hand man, Ellen Page as a promising young student who becomes the team’s new architect, and Tom Hardy as the brawns with brains of the operation. Michael Caine shows up too for a cameo as Cobb’s father, but this isn’t an actor’s movie. Everyone is fine for his or her part though, particularly DiCaprio who has a way of bringing emotional credibility to roles you wouldn’t think needed it.

The inception job proves to be rather complicated; there’s a dream within a dream within a dream and there’s more after that but what would be the point of explaining it all here? The team also runs into trouble when they find that their victim’s mind has been trained for this very moment. Apparently it’s possible to turn your subconscious into a sort of cerebral militia.

This is a film that demands a fair amount of mental energy if you want to keep everything straight but Nolan, who also wrote the screenplay, structures the film in a digestible way, keeping its mysteries intriguing rather than frustrating. Late in the movie, when he cuts between three layers of consciousness within more than one person’s mind, we wonder how anyone could have thought The Matrix was difficult to follow. And yet we’re always entertained. There are the occasional lines of bland expository dialogue, but they’re necessary to clarify the complex plot.

Though the premise is high science fiction, the film is essentially a heist movie where the endgame is leaving something behind rather than burglary. Nolan understands this and even if you don’t follow every bit of scientific jargon, he gives us plenty of exciting sequences and moments of CGI wonder.

The film is also more thoughtful than most summer sci-fi or action flicks, meditating on the human consequences of experimenting with the dream world. These people spend as much time in dreams as they do the real world and they’re constantly suspicious that their mind is deceiving them, spinning tops and rolling loaded die to ensure that gravity is functioning as it should. The emotional side of the equation is also treated when haunting memories of Cobb’s wife jeopardize the mission. The film explores in some surprising ways how the mind handles feelings of guilt and denial.

Thoughtful and smart as it may be, Inception, like Nolan’s Batman films, is still a summer blockbuster. Just when we start wondering how the subconscious projections of a man who has probably never held a gun are able to fire submachine guns with impressive accuracy, something cool happens to distract us.

The ending is deliberately ambiguous, leaving you wanting to see the film again, but even without that there is enough here to warrant a second viewing. Christopher Nolan is the rare big-budget auteur that consistently delivers, reminding us that Hollywood hasn’t run out of original ideas. It just needs a few more people like Nolan to sneak in and plant those ideas.

- Steve Avigliano, 7/16/10