‘TO ROME WITH LOVE’

The wide disparity in quality between Woody Allen’s best and worst films leads us to the Pet Monkey Theory of Allen criticism, which postulates that the writer-director has a pet monkey who has learned to type and cranks out about half the screenplays - scripts that Allen goes ahead and films anyway, because he likes to hang out with actors. By this reckoning, for example, “Midnight in Paris” was clearly written by Allen himself.

“To Rome With Love” was written by the monkey.

Yet here’s what’s strange: As awful as “To Rome With Love” is - and the awfulness is unmistakable - it is, as an experience, not unpleasant. You will probably see several better movies this year that you will enjoy less. It’s a mess, but it’s Rome. It’s a mess, but it’s Woody Allen.

At this point, Allen has made so many films that to watch a new one, especially one in which he appears, is to re-experience the previous ones. So when we see him in his first scene in “To Rome With Love,” on a plane flying through turbulence, a hundred previous associations make us get ready to laugh. Judy Davis is sitting next to him, as his wife - that, in itself, is almost funny, too - and he tells her that he has a hard time dealing with turbulence because “I’m an atheist.” Yes, that’s a good-enough line on its own, but backed by more than 40 years of associations, it’s better.

“To Rome With Love” interweaves several distinct stories, and for the first 15 minutes a viewer might reasonably wonder how Allen plans to join these stories together. In fact, the stories remain disparate sketches, cut into pieces and shuffled. Allen himself is in the best one, as a former opera director who accidentally discovers a great operatic tenor - but one who can only sing when he’s in the shower.

The worst segment, plagued by awkward writing, involves Alec Baldwin, as a man who meets what might be his younger self (Jesse Eisenberg) and tries to steer him away from a dangerous femme fatale. Ellen Page, in a case of inexplicable casting, plays the femme fatale.

Still, there are worse things to look at than Rome and worse worlds to inhabit than Woody Allen’s. If you think about “To Rome With Love,” not as a movie but as what Woody did on his Italian vacation, you might be able to like his latest without illusions

— Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

OUT THIS WEEK

“Taken 2,” “The Possession,” “The Intouchables,” “Won’t Back Down,” “Branded,” “About Cherry,” “Being Human: Season 4,” “Men Of A Certain Age, Season 2.”