It Could Happen to You (1994)

It Could Happen to You arrives from 1994, a year when a New York cop could offer half a lottery ticket in place of a tip and the culture treated this as a charming premise. Andrew Bergman directs the material with a soft glow, letting Nicolas Cage and Bridget Fonda perform decency as a low-key virtue. The film has a multiracial supporting cast, including Wendell Pierce, Isaac Hayes, Rosie Perez, and Víctor Rojas, and it never pauses to congratulate itself for that fact. Race is simply not the subject. The story remains a colorblind romantic fable, which is either a limitation or a relief depending on your patience for identity as plot device.

The moral engine is generosity, and the film contrasts it with greed. Muriel, the wife, is a cartoon of acquisitive vanity, while Yvonne is defined by romantic devotion and a charitable table for the hungry. This is private virtue, not a systemic critique. The film does not argue that capitalism is broken. It argues that some individuals are nice and others are not. There are no LGBTQ characters or themes, no climate concerns, no body-positivity messaging, and no neurodivergent representation. The women are not offered a feminist program. If anything, the materialistic wife functions as a cautionary caricature, punished by a con artist and sent back to the Bronx.

The film is inspired by a real 1984 lottery story, but it makes no attempt to revise history. It invents a romance around the premise and lets the facts sit in the credits. Its sermonizing is mild. Kindness matters, keep your word, and do not marry someone who will sue you for lottery money. The film delivers this through plot and character, not lectures. The result is a gentle, dated confection with a modest social conscience and almost no interest in the cultural battles that would later consume the discourse. It wants to be liked, and it mostly succeeds. In the taxonomy of contemporary virtue signaling, this is a museum piece: pleasant, harmless, and entirely of its time.