When in Rome (2010)

Beth Martin curates art at the Guggenheim and has soured on romance, so she flies to Rome for her sister's wedding and fishes five coins from a fountain, thereby acquiring a sausage magnate, a street magician, a painter, a male model, and one poker chip that may or may not belong to the reporter she actually likes. The arrangement is a reverse Three Coins in the Fountain, an observation the film makes about itself and then abandons. Released in 2010, it belongs to a strain of studio romantic comedy that asks nothing of the culture and receives nothing in return.

The cast is a wall of white faces interrupted briefly by Shaquille O'Neal, Lawrence Taylor, and Ghostface Killah, each playing himself, which constitutes the film's entire gesture toward a broader America. Beth holds a demanding job and speaks of love as a luxury she cannot afford, so a faint pulse of professional ambition does beat somewhere beneath the pratfalls. Then the plot marries her off in a Roman church and the credits roll. The institution goes unexamined. The career is a costume she wears before the wedding dress.

Every other modern sensitivity goes untouched. No environmental anxiety troubles the Vespa chase. No class critique surfaces, though a sausage king and a self-absorbed model wander through the frame and could have supported one. Danny DeVito's height is a punchline, not a celebration. Nobody is neurodivergent. History is not revised. And the film never pauses to instruct us, which in this taxonomy is its own quiet mercy. It wants only to be a breezy farce about magic coins, and it fails at even that, with a 17 percent approval rating and a third place opening. We are left with a pleasant, weightless artifact, and the ledger, as always, must be balanced.