Film Review: Woody Allen?s ?Rome With Love? (de Roma con Amor)

Film Review: Woody Allen?s ?Rome With Love? (de Roma con Amor)

Woody Allen comes off of the magic of Midnight in Paris to contemplate love, fame and longing in the Eternal City.

The cast is large for a director who favors ensembles, and each role carries a lot of weight on this holiday in Roma.

The cast headlines: Woody Allen, Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Pen?lope Cruz, Judy Davis, Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig and Ellen Page.

And there is a list of co-stars, including the fabulous tenor Fabio Armiliato steals the show.

The film begins in confusion a traffic jam and a traffic cop who serves as an occasional narrator and finishes with a standing ovation from the audience.

In ?To Rome with Love? Woody Allen returns to acting putting himself in good company, with everyone putting in really good performances.

Woody Allen?s films have always felt autobiographical to me reflecting and exploring of his intellectual questions of and in his personal life.

This film feels especially close as it is really a story of an aging man working to remain relevant. As Jerry, Haley?s father, he wears his years in his face, his fragility, his vulnerability and impatience.

Since he is the filmmaker he gives Jerry shot at relevance after retirement. It involves Giancarlo, a mortician by trade, and virtuoso in the shower at night. In this, Armiliato shows exactly why he is loved in Opera circles for his voice and charisma.

In the beginning we find Hayley, Alison Pill, on the sidewalk, the typical college graduate from the US, new to the Eternal City and lost. Soon she is found, swept by Michelangelos, Flavio Parenti. But the couple are really the directors lead into the lives of the parents.

Hayley?s father is Jerry, Woody Allen, a retired classical music and opera impresario/director, her mother is Phyllis, Judy Davis, a psychiatrist.

In Michelangelo?s family, his father, Giancarlo, Armiliato, a mortician. The relationship brings the families together and sets the stage for one of the film?s 4 separate set pieces.

Early on the film shifts to a caf? and a 50ish architect, John, Baldwin, who excuses himself to search for the apartment where he lived 30 yrs earlier. On his way to his old neighborhood, John meets Jack, Eisenberg, a younger version of himself.

Jack is a career driven student architect in love with Sally, Gerwig, but conflicted; should he stay steady or make a play for Sally?s best friend, Monica, Page, an actress on-the-verge, who has unexpectedly turned up on their doorstep for a hiatus? John, is Jack?s voice of reason.

While Jack?s love life is twisting and turning Milly, Alessandra Mastronardi, the provincial Italian newlywed school teacher gets lost and caught up a moral crises, including a brush her matinee idol, Antonio Albanese. Milly?s virgin husband Antonio, Alessandro Tiberi, gets into a pickle with high-end hooker named Anna, Cruz, who opens him up to ambition, expectation and sexual prowess

One of the film?s most delightful section keys on a office clerk, Leopoldo, played by the ebullient Oscar winning Benigni, a family man of no distinction outside his home that finds himself for no good reason at the center of a media storm that gives him a taste of fame for the sake of fame.

You do not need a map to follow the themes of ?To Rome With Love? because the flow is of the film is virtually seamless and fluid, including the imagined and real. Thoroughly enjoyable, I recommend it.

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Paul A. Ebeling, Jnr.

Paul A. Ebeling, Jnr. writes and publishes The Red Roadmaster?s Technical Report on the US Major Market Indices, a weekly, highly-regarded financial market letter, read by opinion makers, business leaders and organizations around the world.

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