C

Are four feeble comic tales linked together better than a single one of feature length? That’s a question one might ponder after watching Woody Allen’s “To Rome With Love,” a scattershot anthology that meshes a quartet of stories, dealing for the most part with issues of celebrity, set in the Eternal City.

Beginning with a straight-to-the-audience invitation from a Roman traffic cop—not unlike the hoary “There are six million stories in the Naked City, and this is one of them” formula from the old TV show—Allen launches into his vignettes, shuffling among them although they have no direct connections or even unfold over a single time frame. One features him as Jerry, a predictably high-strung retired New York opera director traveling to Italy with his wife Phyllis (Judy Davis) to meet the young lawyer, Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti) whom his daughter Hayley (Alison Pill) met while on European tour and got engaged to. The big joke is that when he meets the young man’s father Giancarlo (Fabio Armillato), a mortician, he overhears him singing in a beautiful tenor voice while showering and pressures him into auditioning for a professional career. Unfortunately, when the guy proves able to belt out the notes only while washing up, the still-ambitious Jerry must devise a stage presentation suited to his limited “range.”

Meanwhile, everyman schlub Leopoldo (Roberto Benigni) suddenly finds himself assaulted by journalists and paparazzi who for some unexplained reason make him the latest fifteen-minute celebrity whose every word and action has to be covered and commented on. In the process the previously ignored fellow finds—unsurprisingly—that being famous has drawbacks as well as benefits.

In another strand, young Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi) and his naïve bride Milly (Alessandra Mastronardi) arrive at hotel from the countryside to meet his aunts and uncles, whose (unspecified) business he plans to join. But a series of accidents leaves him in the company of lusty prostitute Anna (Penelope Cruz) whom his relatives mistake for his wife, and his real wife spending the day with movie star Luca (Antonio Albanese) whose plans involve more than just being nice to a fan.

Finally, Jesse Eisenberg plays Jack, an architectural student who bumps into cynical American tourist John (Alec Baldwin) who’s famous and successful in the field. The young man invites the guy to meet his girlfriend Sally (Greta Gerwig), who abruptly announces that her friend Monica (Ellen Page), an actress, is coming for a stay. Inevitably sparks will fly between the student and the newcomer, while John—who’s either the older version of Jack looking back wryly at his own mistakes or some sort of omnipresent observer—warns him that it will turn out badly.

All four of these episodes are decidedly slight, with the two strictly Italian ones particularly thin. Benigni and Cruz work overtime to bring some life to them, but both end up as set-ups without punchlines of consequence. Allen’s own operatic scenario has a punchline, of course, but it’s one that’s, curiously, not taken as far as it might be. The final sequence elicits only mild chuckles rather than belly laughs; one might have expected a much more elaborate—and funny—mounting of “Pagliacci” from a fellow who supposedly staged “Rigoletto” with all the characters dressed as white mice. Other than that, only Allen’s familiar hyper-nervous shtick gets any traction. The Eisenberg story, meanwhile, follows a very predictable trajectory, and only Baldwin’s snarky commentary rises above the pedestrian.

The cast does everything asked of them, though not much more than that, and the movie is technically fine, with Allen and cinematographer Darius Khondji providing many picture-postcard shots of the city (though not as many as Allen did of Paris in his last movie). It’s a pretty nice travelogue, but otherwise “To Rome With Love” is just a series of four disappointingly slight one-joke featurettes.