A Dissent from the Popular View
I'd call this a "chick flick," but that's insulting to women on at least two levels -- the term and to suggest that women as a group would find this collection of hoary cinematic cliches the least bit interesting. The true stars of the movie are the Italian countryside, wonderfully photographed in all seasons, and the house, but basically this is one of those Home and Garden TV fixer upper shows with a multi-million dollar budget. Diane Lane is supposed to be a tough, unsentimental reviewer whose barbed jibes stay with authors for years. This hardly tracks with her character, who immediately falls for any pretty, vacant, younger male face who wanders into her field of vision, and then is shocked, SHOCKED (Casablanca-style) when she turns out to be a mere dalliance for him. Also from the cliche mill -- the plucky lesbian, Asian for diversity interest, who has been abandoned mid-pregnancy by her lover and heads off to Tuscany to have her baby (Sandra Oh does get the one really funny line in the movie, however, when a toilet bubbles over with hot water and she observes that it's really useful if you want to "give your butt a facial."); the handsome middle-aged Italian who has "never cheated on my wife," but always turns up without her and with sage advice; and finally the old, eccentric Englishwoman, long-time resident of the town who is fond of nuzzling ducklings against her cheek in the farmers' market (Lane's character finds this fascinating), poses nude for her younger painter lovers, and dances drunk in fountains like a Fellini character.

To all of this many others reviewing here apparently say "terrific." This dissenting view says, "Ugh."

The main character is played by the pretty Diane Lane, but looks alone cannot salvage this dreadful character. She cries, she pouts, she is unbearably naive and, let's just say it, she is an idiot.

The storyline is full of cliches. And where there are not cliches, there are gaping plot holes: why does her far-too-attractive-to-be-true Italian boyfriend drive a sports car when his family run a modest cafe on the beach that is supposed to support all of them? And just how does she manage to up and move to Italy without even having to fill in an immigration form? And if she was so broke that she had to move out of her mansion in San Francisco into a run-down fleabag hotel, just how the hell can she afford to suddenly buy and renovate a house in Italy, as well as living there for months with no visible means of income?

The worst part of a spectacularly awful script is the love interest suddenly written in at the very last minute to tie everything up neatly - that really is bad writing of such magnitude that it deserves a special Oscar.

Still, if you turn the sound off, you can enjoy genuinely beautiful photography of Italy.

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