Cruz control

TO ROME WITH LOVE isn’t Woody Allen’s weakest movie, but it’s in the back of the stack, thanks to the lack of trying anything new.  Laughs are limited in the 2012 yawn, an exhausted retread of types and tropes he’d revisited so many times that they felt like the robocalls and ad popups you can’t stop, no matter how many times you hang up, punch delete or threaten bodily harm. Oddly, this snore was the immediate follow-up to the charming Midnight In Paris which had all of us who usually like his work remember why.  A handful of commendable features in this one are worth a salute, but they’re not enough to save a soggy log from the bottom of the Woodypile.

A four-story pastiche has visitors to Rome mixing with residents. On the positive end, the city is as beguiling as ever, bathed in luxurious sun-dappled hues in the cinematography from Darius Khondji. Penelope Cruz is voluptuously present as as a cheery call girl , injecting her scenes with energy and attitude. As a sweet-natured schoolteacher and new bride visiting the big city for the first time, Alessandra Mastronardi is a real charmer. Elliot Page (then Ellen) nails it as a coy actress, self-centered and oblivious to the damage-in-passing her behavior creates.

Alessandra Mastronardi

And…that’s it. The script is dead on arrival, and Allen himself, 77 and back on screen for the first time in six years, is so faded he’s almost a hologram. The rest of the cast works the wan material, but its inauthentic characters don’t support them. Alec Baldwin is tiring, Roberto Benigni flails, and Jesse Eisenberg is the antithesis of appealing. It’s too long to boot, 112 minutes.

Others on hand to little avail include Judy Davis, Alison Pill, Greta Gerwig, Alessandro Tiberi, Ornela Muti, Flavio Parenti, Fabio Armiliato, Antonio Albanese, Cecilia Capriotti and Carol Alt. Made for a relatively efficient $17,000,000, it grossed $73,245,000 globally: of that just $16,686,000 was in the US, where it faded away at 116th place in the 2012 crowd.