Alec Baldwin, Ellen Page and Jesse Eisenberg. (Philippe Antonello/Sony Pictures Classics)

If you were making a movie about Rome, what song would you use first? If you guessed “Volare,” you made the same choice as one of the world’s most celebrated directors. This isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Moviegoers have long been used to bad Woody Allen movies. Then he finally left his beloved Upper East Side. The commercial and critical success of Allen’s trips to London and Barcelona gave fans hope, and his trip to Paris resulted in his biggest hit in years. Sadly, the neurotic auteur has returned to mediocrity, continental style, with a travelogue that too often is as obvious as the song that opens it.

To Rome with Love plays like one of those forgettable exchange-students-abroad films like French Postcards where a summer in a magical foreign land changes their lives—forever! The movie follows the adventures of four couples of different generations as they navigate the eternal city. Like Midnight in Paris, the movie’s vision of its foreign subject is a lot like that of a wide-eyed tourist. But Midnight in Paris had a single charming conceit that won over a lot of critics and moviegoers. To Rome With Love throws several conceits into Trevi Fountain, and even if one holds your interest another comes along that probably won’t. A few of them drown immediately, wishes unfulfilled. Another flails around a while before sinking. Only one stays afloat, thanks to, of all people, Alec Baldwin.

Allen often casts directorial stand-ins, but he returns to the screen for the first time since 2006’s Scoop. Jerry is a retired schlub who comes to Rome with his wife (Judy Davis) to visit their daughter Hayley (Alison Pill, Midnight in Paris’s Zelda Fitzgerald) and meet her Italian fiancée Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti, last seen on these shores opposite Tilda Swinton’s 60-foot nipple in I Am Love).

But Jerry is not the only Woody in this picture. In his 1979 classic Manhattan, he quips to ex-wife Jill (Meryl Streep) who is raising a child with her lesbian partner: “I feel very few people survive one mother.” Consumers should be advised that To Rome with Love requires that the moviegoer survive at least four Woody Allens.

Woody Antonio (Alessandro Tiberi) is a young Italian newlywed who finds himself in the middle of a sex farce co-starring Penelope Cruz as the prostitute mistaken for his wife. Woody Leopoldo (Roberto Benigni) is a middle-class mensch who suddenly finds his peaceful existence invaded by a mob of paparazzi. Woody Jack (Jesse Eisenberg) is a young architect living with his girlfriend Sally (Greta Gerwig).

Alessandro Tiberi and Penélope Cruz (Philippe Antonello/Sony Pictures Classics).

This last subplot is like the others a retread of better Woody Allen movies. But this one has legs. Senior architect John (Alec Baldwin) wanders Rome looking for the street where he lived as a young student when he runs into Jack, whose current station in life reminds him of his own youth. As difficult as it is to imagine Jesse Eisenberg growing up to become Alec Baldwin, these scenes are the movie’s funniest. His role is a cross between Tony Roberts in Annie Hall and Bogie in Play it Again, Sam. When Sally invites her best friend Monica (Ellen Page) to stay with them, John suddenly and incongruously appears to warn the young man of the pitfalls of this arrangement. Page’s “I’m so neurotic I’m deep” act makes this episode a kind of Woody Allen sandwich, and the director seems to have more invested in a thread that might have carried the whole movie. It certainly pushes it beyond the melodrama and obviousness of the other subplots.

A mortician (Fabio Armiliato) who is a fantastic opera singer—but only in the shower—may be yet another Woody Allenesque figure, whose significant talents are compromised by neuroses. To Rome with Love was originally titled Bop Decameron and later Nero Fiddled, either of which promised more interesting concepts. But the movie, with its mostly uninspired locations and half-hearted writing, ended up with the generic title it deserves. The Eisenberg-Baldwin-Page scenes would have made a featurette on par with Good Woody Allen. It’s too bad he surrounded it with fluff.

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To Rome with Love
Written and directed by Woody Allen.
With Jesse Eisenberg, Ellen Page, Alec Baldwin, Penelope Cruz, and a cast of dozens.
Rated R for some sexual references
Opens today at E Street, Bethesda Row, Shirlington and Cinema Arts Theatre.