Valentine's Day (2010)

Garry Marshall's Valentine's Day arrives as a greeting card with a payroll, a Los Angeles mosaic in which roughly two dozen recognizable faces rotate through eighteen hours of romantic misadventure. The structure owes an obvious debt to Love Actually, though the debt is settled in loose change. Critics were unkind, audiences eventually drifted away, and the film nonetheless opened at number one over the holiday that shares its name. Such is the marketplace, and such is the critic's burden, to sit with these things and count.

The cultural inventory here is modest and mostly incidental. A closeted football player, Sean Jackson, comes out on national television and is reunited with his lover, a subplot handled with sincerity and a fair share of screen time. The ensemble is thoroughly multiracial, though Los Angeles casting being what it is, nobody remarks on it. An Army captain crosses the country for a single day with her son. A woman takes a second job in phone sex to service a six-figure student loan, a detail played for laughs and never pursued as economic grievance. An "I Hate Valentine's Day" party signals a certain weariness with the holiday, and the weariness is itself the joke.

The absences are equally instructive. There is no environmental conscience, no engagement with history, no commentary on bodies, no neurological difference, no racial argument. It is a confection assembled by a director who understood that audiences want to leave the theater humming. It lectures no one. It means no harm. It also means very little else, and there is a strange integrity in that, a kind of honesty about its own weightlessness that more ambitious pictures could learn from and almost never do. The sommelier notes: thin, sweet, no finish. Pairs with nothing. Scores accordingly low, with one small pour for the football player who told the truth on camera and was rewarded for it, which in 2010 was still a mild act of nerve.