Last month, my dad was out of town for the weekend and my mom and I had
the house to ourselves, so we decided to indulge in a chick flick
marathon. One of movies we watched was When In Rome, a 2010 movie directed by Mark Steven Johnson and starring Kristen Bell.
In
this romantic comedy, Bell plays Beth, a career-driven art expert who
flies to Rome for her sister’s wedding, where she clicks with Nick (Josh
Duhamel), another ambitious young American. After she catches him
locking lips with another woman, she drunkenly makes her way to the
nearby wishing fountain littered with the coins of those desperate for
love and pockets five of them in a symbolic gesture of her contempt for
romance. As a result, the men who dropped the coins are instantly drawn
to her like a magnet, and once she returns to New York, she has to fight
them off with a stick.
The premise of this movie is very silly,
but it makes for a pretty entertaining comedy. Beth is in the midst of
an important gallery opening, and she has no time for distractions, but
it’s hard to focus on her work with these strange men chasing after her
all the time. Meanwhile, when Nick resurfaces, she finds herself falling
for him but worries that he is only suffering from the same loony
lovesickness that has afflicted her other suitors.
These four fellas are a lot of fun. John Heder of Napoleon Dynamite
fame plays Lance, an offbeat magician who seems to click with Beth more
than the other two young artistic types over whom she has inadvertently
cast her spell. Will Arnett is Antonio Donatella, an Italian artist who
shows his affection for Beth by painting massive murals of her for all
of New York to see, and Dax Shepard is the obnoxious Gale, an aspiring
model who is totally in love with himself. Then there’s Danny DeVito,
who plays Al, a gentle widower who expresses his romantic ardor with
food. Of the four, he is probably my favorite.
Scenery plays a
big role in the movie, with many scenes showcasing landmarks in Rome and
New York. The impassioned pursuits across the city are amusing, while
the fairly standard courtship with Nick is sweet, with some fun twists.
One scene involving Kristen Schaal in full goofball mode as a waitress
in a restaurant specializing in sensory deprivation is patently absurd,
providing both laughs and a squirm or two. There’s slapstick aplenty in
the movie, and I would really call it more of a comedy than a romance,
though the movie is drenched in romance of the superficial variety.
This is nothing but light, frothy fun, but as long as you approach it as such, When In Rome is an entertaining fantasy that deals with the exhilaration and pitfalls of infatuation.
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