Friends, Romans, country bumpkins

To Rome, With Love begins already in motion, the camera curving around a roundabout until it lands on a statue-like traffic cop who confesses that he speaks poor English but is nonetheless eager to introduce us to some of his fellow Romans and their stories. It’s a corny bookend device of the sort we’ve seen in Woody Allen’s films before, the sort of throwaway cliché he enjoys employing, hopefully in the service of something more adventurous and unexpected. And To Rome, With Love is adventurous, though, more to the point, after more than 40 years and I don’t know how many movies, this may be the most unapologetically, deliriously, busily, messily nonsensical Woody Allen comedy ever. It is also frequently very, very funny.

To make an anagram of the film’s titular city, the operative word in Rome is more: more characters, more stories, more goofiness. We got a middle-aged bureaucrat (Roberto Benigni) who wakes up one day to discover that he’s a celebrity. He’s attacked by paparazzi, is whisked off to a morning show where he describes his breakfast, is given an office of his own and a giraffe in a tight dress who’s job detail involves “attending to his needs all day long.” We got an unhappily retired novelty opera director (Allen, in his increasingly ridiculous looking oversized chinos) and his psychiatrist wife (Judy Davis) who’ve come to Rome to visit their daughter (Alison Pill) and the family she’s about to marry into, a family whose patriarch is a mortician who sings like Caruso, at least in the shower. But how is Woody going to get him to realize he’s a star waiting to be exploited, I mean, discovered? (I can never tell if Woody gives himself the best lines or simply delivers them better than everybody else. While discussing his proletariat-championing son-in-law-to-be, he quips, “I was Left when I was his age too, but I wasn’t a communist. I couldn’t even share a bathroom.”

We got a couple of newlywed country bumpkins in the big city for the first time. She gets lost in the streets—for days! He’s unexpectedly visited by a prostitute (Penelope Cruz)! His wealthy Roman relatives walk in to his hotel room just as he and the prostitute and entangled on the bed, and in a moment of panic he pretends she’s his wife. The false couple are taken on a private tour of the Vatican and to a garden party brimming with Rome’s bigwigs of business—most of whom are Cruz’s clients. (A hooker who gets to hobnob with society: Davis isn’t the only thing resurrected from Deconstructing Harry.)

We got a young American architectural student (Jesse Eisenberg) enjoying a pleasant life abroad with his girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) until the girlfriend’s beguiling actress friend (Ellen Page, excellent as the fille fatale) comes to visit. “There’s something attractive about a man who’s sensitive to the agonies of existence,” she explains en route to a torrid affair with the hapless Eisenberg, who meanwhile receives romantic advice from an elder version of himself (Alec Baldwin, his brooding deadpan perfect for the film’s most absurd character). Baldwin’s introduced as an apparently normal guy, ie: not a phantom, returning the city where he spent his 20s, yet soon he meets Eisenberg and winds up tagging along on the kid’s adventures. Sometimes only Eisenberg can see and hear Baldwin; sometimes others can see and hear him. It’s totally inconsistent, ridiculous, and one of the best parts of the movie.

What’s it all about? Thrills are fleeting, fame is fickle, nostalgia is inherently false, romance is illusory. The usual Woody themes, but delivered with brio by a wonderful cast. Leave the monster truck rally superhero blockbusters to somebody else; this is my idea of silly summer fun.

  

Inception: Leave the dreaming to us

They move through cities that fold in on themselves, that resemble immense cemeteries, that erode into seas; through zero-gravity hotel corridors, across bridges, between skyscrapers, over arctic tundra, and into hidden chambers. The protagonists in Christopher Nolan’s Inception are in many ways your archetypical assemblage of criminal experts convening for the perfect heist, speaking in action movie boilerplate, wearing nifty duds, yet here the crime unfolds not in some bustling metropolis but rather in the vast and intricate dream worlds of the mark… or is it the dream of the criminal? If everyone’s sharing the same dream, can the dream “belong” to only one of the dreamers? While we try to sort this all out we can marvel at the scenery. The worlds within worlds invoked here are overwhelmingly impressive in terms of scale. Nolan, a great craftsman, has been given the resources to dream, and he dreams very, very big. I’m not sure he dreams very deep.

Master infiltrator Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is normally hired to extract information from the dreams he burgles, but a vaguely sinister, unfathomably affluent new client (Ken Watanabe) wants Cobb instead to plant information in his target’s unconscious mind. The goal is to penetrate the dreams of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the son of a dying industrialist, and convince him to divvy up dad’s monopoly. Cobb has something ugly in his past—like all Nolan’s protagonists, he’s so ridden with guilt it’s turning toxic—and remuneration includes his hassle-free passage home to the US, where he’s a wanted man, so Cobb accepts, introducing the one-last-gig trope into Inception’s genre touchstones. Cobb gathers his cohorts: the supporting ensemble includes an unusually stuffy Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bronson’s charismatic and dexterous Tom Hardy, Ellen Page, giving by far the film’s most natural performance, and Dileep Rao, that annoying magical guy from Drag Me to Hell. Gradually the group’s adventure becomes less about messing with Fischer’s business sense than it does staving off Cobb’s inner demons. Cobb’s been rattled by dream-encounters with his hysterical wife (Marion Cotillard), or at least his memory of her, with increasing frequency. He’s apparently in danger of slipping into this permanent, gray matter-draining REM state forever. Or, you know, something really bad, anyway.

Much time is spent establishing the rules of psychic corporate espionage—the unspecified injections used to plunge participants deep enough into sleep, the mental tricks required to navigate one’s way through another’s dreams without getting lost, the necessity of a dream architect, a sort of production designer of the future—though much of how this business really fails or functions is nonetheless left pretty sketchy. Nolan seems more concerned with the idea of inner logic than he does in its actual exploration. Still, there are enough intriguing details—the reliance on personal totems to ground the dreamers, such as Cobb’s tiny metal top, being chief among them—to satisfy one’s sense of having entered a world with some reasonably consistent chains of cause and effect, and the final scene, a cliffhanger of sorts, works to the film’s overall strengths.

More distracting is the sheer aneurotic, humourless tidiness of Nolan’s dream worlds, which bear little resemblance to the amorphous, murky, slippery dreams most of us experience, places far more vividly and idiosyncratically realized by filmmakers like David Cronenberg, Luis Buñuel, David Lynch, Richard Linklater, or Andrei Tarkovsky, a key influence on Inception’s morbid love story. The realms Inception traverses feel closer to some science fiction novelist’s notion of virtual reality than they do to the places we visit in out sleep. But if these realms fail to resonate as a reflection of our dreams at least they provide terrain for an unusually fantastical crime thriller, one which revels in elegantly edited set pieces that each fit snugly into their respective slots in the writer-director’s intricate stratagem. Inception is an exhausting film—and I actually think it kind of needs to be—and is more problematic the more you think about it. It’s also easily the most stimulating spectacle movie you’ll find on the menu this summer.

So long as Juno and I know...

Getting unexpectedly pregnant after having sex for the first time with a buddy at the age of 16 is generally sort of a drag, but for the titular hipster heroine of Juno, played with spunky verve by Haligonian wunderkind Ellen Page, it’s not quite the bad deal you might expect. Perhaps its because something about her world just seems a little more fun and cozy than the one the rest of us live in.

No one seems to mind when Juno re-creates a rumpus room on somebody’s front lawn. Her local druggist speaks in alliteration-heavy aphorisms. Her ex-army dad and doggie-crazed step-mom (the appealing pairing of JK Simmons and Alison Janney) don’t even get pissed off when Juno tells them she’s got a bun in the oven. There’s a girl from school protesting against abortion outside the clinic Juno visits, but even she just seems kinda huggable, even informative. Plus, cute little indie rock songs seems to be playing everywhere Juno goes. The film almost makes you want to run out and get pregnant.

Juno was directed by Montreal-born Jason Reitman (Thank You for Smoking), who has a nice feeling for pace and humour, a catchy way of framing the Vancouver-as-generic-US-city locations, and, it would seem, an easy way with actors. The film has a winsome attitude that’s only slightly soured by Reitman’s excess of eagerness to tear pages from Wes Anderson or even Jared Hess’s baroque scrapbooks, flooding each scene with kitschy costumes and paraphernalia and offbeat pop culture references. There’s even a Kinks song. The approach works well enough for the material, but Reitman’s not going to win any awards for originality.

More curiously, Juno was written by one Diablo Cody. If that name sounds like it belongs to an ex-stripper, you’d be on the right track. If it sounds like it belongs to a pretty clever ex-stripper, you’d be batting a 1000. If anything, Juno values cleverness above all else, giving the verbally able Page a steady stream of one-liners only rarely punctuated by something not deep-fried in irony. With this, her first produced screenplay, Cody seems to trust her cheek more than her heart, but there is ultimately a significant amount of subtext here that helps raise the film up above your average teen movie flotsam.

After deciding, in a commendably non-didactic scene, that abortion just isn’t for her, Juno lands upon an ad in the local Pennysaver posted by Mark and Vanessa (Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner), a youngish, upper middle-class couple looking for a kid. Juno and her dad pay a visit to the couple’s expansive suburban home and quickly surmises that while her unborn child will probably have to battle against suffocating décor, love and safety are almost ensured. It’s equally clear however that trouble is brewing in this beige carpeted paradise: Mark is stifling an undying love for horror flicks and punk rock, winning points with Juno but displeasing the studiously adult (i.e.: emasculating) Vanessa.

With this crucial element of Mark and Vanessa, Juno begins to reveal the real smarts that underline its sass. The film conveys a decidedly inclusive inclination toward families of all types and in all states. Juno isn’t sure yet quite how she feels about the soft-spoken father of her baby-in-the-making (Superbad’s Michael Cera –yet another Canuck!), but she’s beginning to ask serious questions about the elusive nature of love and the deeper value of trust and support. As the plot thickens, she, and we, can see that love, trust and support can be lost and found in expected places, and one of the real pleasures of Cody’s story lies in the way it doesn’t let any single major character remain a mere type when called upon to make important decisions.

How well anything in the film comes across ultimately comes down to Page’s performance, and, like the film as a whole, it’s a piece of work that, at its best, is characterized by its distinctive way of catching you off guard. Though still only 20 and elfin, Page has been slated as the next big thing for a little while now. The web-dating sicko thriller Hard Candy was meant to be her breakthrough, but she’s far better served by Juno. She has a terrifically breezy way with the dialogue and never forces emotion, even when the script seems to demand it of her. The performance of the year? Not quite. The first major stop on a road to a brilliant career? Very likely.