Anne Pick

To Rome With Love is set in the Eternal City and has distinctive, eternally Woody Allen qualities. From the neurotic leading characters to the cinematography, which captures the beauty of the city, it’s plain to see this film has Allen engrained throughout. To Rome With Love comprises various vignettes that never intersect, but rather dance around each other with the shared themes of love, infidelity and celebrity. While at first it seems as if no reoccurring, singular theme unites the vignettes, as Allen did with anthology films such as New York, I Love You and Paris, je t’aime, as the movie progresses the cohesion becomes more apparent.
Again Allen is interested in the theme of love and sub-themes of longing and infidelity. In this case, we meet Jack (Jesse Eisenberg), a budding architect living in Rome with his girlfriend Sally (Greta Gerwig). When Sally’s friend Monica (Ellen Page), an out-of-work actress, comes to visit after having broken up with her most recent victim, er… boyfriend, Sally fears Jack will fall hopelessly in love with Monica as every other man has.

Many factors make a Woody Allen movie uniquely Woody Allen. While his style incorporates distinctive dialogue, neurotic characters and beautiful city landscapes—casting has always been his strong suit. In both To Rome With Love and last year’s Midnight in Paris, several of young Hollywood’s brightest stars have joined Allen’s ensemble.
Since Allen most frequently played the anxious leading men he also wrote about, finding the right young men in Hollywood to replace him is a sensitive and daunting task. After his roles in Zombieland, Adventureland and in some respects The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg may be the most competent choice to someday fill Allen’s shoes.