to woody with love.

To Rome with Love

I saw the new Woody Allen movie To Rome with Love this weekend, and it depressed me. Not simply because it was terrible—which it certainly was—but also because it seemed to mark the definitive end of an era. Woody Allen has made a film a year for approximately forty years now, and given that kind of output, he's sure to crap out some stinkers here and there. In the early 2000s, Allen had a streak of   half-assed films that seemed products of rote, ritualistic filmmaking rather than a sincere attempt at an artform. Although there are some pleasures to be found in this rough patch, I can't think of an adjective that better describes the period than wan. There was an unsettling dearth of liveliness and depth in films like Small Time Crooks, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, and Hollywood Ending. These were, for the most part, cold, standoffish films. We wanted to like them because we remembered the good old days, so we tried. Of course, there's always more at stake with nostalgia than idle pleasure; there's always a very real sense of irrelevance and mortality. It can be a terrifying thing to catch a glimpse of the life that we still hold dear as somebody else might see it: dated, faltering, anachronistic. We always want to find a place for ourselves at the center of things, but Woody Allen's films of the early 2000s are somewhere else. They are a passionless mimicry—entertainment several times removed.

Small Time Crooks

One of my favorite Woody Allen films—actually, one of my favorite films by anybody—is usually considered a lesser work by most fans—an enjoyable trifle that doesn't have any real significance in the way that Manhattan or Crimes and Misdemeanors has. But what is a prerequisite in any Woody Allen film (for me)—before narrative depth or lofty themes—is the sense of the richly inhabited world that Allen traffics in (when he's successful, anyway). Manhattan Murder Mystery, my personal favorite, lives or dies based on the chemistry between Woody Allen and Diane Keaton as the bored, aging couple Larry and Carol Lipman whose textured and easily recognizable history, suggested by their exasperated familiarity with one another, fleshes them out as few cinematic couples have ever been. This isn't to say that we know a lot of facts about them. What do we need facts for? We aren't writing their autobiographies, after all. But we nevertheless know them—through and through—in such a way that we feel we've suddenly always known them and could step into a conversation with them at a moment's notice. It's the kind of character development—that strange alchemy combining acting, writing, and direction—that runs off the page of the script. Larry and Carol Lipman are still out there inhabiting the world, growing and changing, no doubt, but never straying from our intimate acquaintance.

Manhattan Murder Mystery

When Woody Allen films seemed to have lost this richness in the early 2000s, it was the first foreboding. I didn't count him out yet though. I trusted that these successive commercial and critical failures might cause him to reevaluate the way he did things, and ultimately his renaissance was realized in the 2005 film Match Point. Much has been made of Woody Allen decamping from his very particular New York City milieu (affluent, intellectual, Upper East Side, etc.) for London—but Allen has left New York City before... September, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, and Zelig are films from his 'mature period' in which he vacationed from his stomping grounds, in whole or in part. Allen's London is in fact quite similar to his rarified New York—affluent, intellectual, artistic... The more startling difference isn't the locale, but the complete lack of humor. Match Point is essentially a bleak film. It's his first work of unremitting seriousness that met with widespread critical claim. Interiors and September were mostly panned, and Another Woman was greeted mainly with indifference. 

Match Point

I like but don't love Match Point. It's effective in its way, but I feel as though I can see Woody working very, very hard here. A little too hard. Jonathan Rhys Meyers is also  underequipped to handle the role he is called to play—a character that should be more complex and charismatic than his impassive handsomeness permits. But the point is that Match Point was a great reassurance to Woody Allen fans. It showed him capable of adapting and embarking upon more challenging projects with some measure of success.


Woody's renaissance peaked with Midnight in Paris last year, which ended up being the most commercially successful (as well as one of the most critically acclaimed) film of Allen's long career. It was an unexpected return to relevance for a director who didn't seem to know how to navigate the changing cinematic landscape.

 Midnight in Paris

But now Allen has followed the peak with another valley, one of the deepest of his oeuvre. The film To Rome with Love is not upsetting because it isn't entertaining; no, the situation is a little graver than that. Woody Allen seems to have actually regressed into ineptitude occasionally during the filming—to have forgotten or lost the instincts and skills he accumulated over his career. While the film is basically an unremarkable farce, following four different and distinct storylines, it is nevertheless odd. Allen has filled the film to the gills with redundant scenes—place-fillers, essentially—that give the film length if not depth. 


There are choices that struck me by their amateurishness. For example, we are forced to watch what seems like endless scenes of one character getting lost in Rome—all of them tropes, cultural cliches—but still this isn't enough. Allen places the character in a piazza and spins the camera around her in an extended shot of disorientation, in order to beat the dead horse. It's as if he doubts his ability to convey lostness, so he pummels us with connect-the-dot scenes of the character asking for directions and looking around in confusion.

To Rome with Love

One of the plots involves an average schmuck played by Roberto Benigni becoming, suddenly and without reason, a media celebrity. I really should have prefaced this paragraph with 'spoiler' because that's all there is to his storyline: scene after unfunny scene of Benigni mugging for the camera while being chased by photographers or grilled by a television interviewer about what he had for breakfast. I don't know if Allen is so out-of-touch that he thinks this passes for insight or uproarious satire, but it depresses the hell out of me that he assembled so many actors together for the purpose of filming sketches, hazy ideas, and mere starting-off points. 


Nothing that happens to any of the characters is surprising. In another story, Jesse Eisenberg's character is about to cheat on his girlfriend with her best friend (a miscast Ellen Page), but Alec Baldwin is there as a Greek chorus (from concentrate) advising him against it and telling him all the ways it could go wrong. And everything happens exactly as Baldwin predicted. The end. Wasn't that interesting? 

To Rome with Love

Earlier in this blog entry, I referred to the movie as the 'end of an era.' Okay, I was probably being dramatic—but then again, maybe not. Many great directors fail (often) during their careers, but I don't think many of these failures are as sloppy and immature as To Rome with Love. A friend recently told me that Woody Allen said the reason he makes a film every year is so that he won't have time to think about death. That's what this film feels like to me. A desperate diversion. The end product has ceased to matter; all we get with To Rome with Love is a ritual that impels itself. 


It's strange because one of the things I did while watching this film is think about death. Not mine, but Woody Allen's. I want to hold on to his shirtsleeve to make sure he never leaves, but in a way I fear that he already has.