When in Rome Movie Review

Her days are full and fulfilling. She wears nice clothes. She has good teeth. Why, Beth's life is--she insists to anyone within earshot--perfect. Perfect, she tells us! A man? Well, until she meets someone she loves more than her job (yeah, like that's going to happen), a man would just get in the way.

It's a given, then, that Beth's aghast when her little sister, Joan, announces that she's about to marry a mysterious Italian man she met on a plane a couple of weeks earlier. And when I say "about to marry," I mean within, like, days. In Rome. 

"Two weeks?" Beth exclaims. "That's not even enough time for a credit check." 

But Joan is not to be swayed, and so Beth takes leave of her precious job to attend the wedding in Europe's Eternal City--a place so bursting with romance that its citizens likely toss their excess romance into recycle bins, 'cause if they don't it just washes into the gutters and clogs 'em something awful.

Somebody must have missed trash day about the time Beth arrives, because she immediately falls for the wedding's best man, Nick, who has the physique of a Renaissance statue and the grace of a caffeinated walrus. The two hit it off, and Beth's almost sure that Nick might be the one--until she catches another woman smooching him.

Deeply peeved at Nick, herself and the entire Roman empire, Beth finds solace in a bottle of champagne, plops herself down by Rome's (fictional) Fountain of Love and starts reading the riot act to the statue in its center. And then, in a fit of drunken logic, she swipes a handful of coins from the fountain--just for spite.

Little does Beth know that the fountain has had so much romance dumped in it over the years

 that the stuff has mutated into a powerful, somewhat capricious force that would surely let loose a bone-chilling cackle if blessed with vocal chords. But it's not, so instead the fountain casts a spell on the stolen coins' original owners: Those who tossed their pennies into the thing are now completely smitten with Beth and will do anything--including pursuing her all the way back to New York--to win her love.

When in Rome is a silly, predictable, occasionally sweet and relatively clean romcom. It's refreshing to see a romance not terminate under the sheets. 

But while the film doesn't overemphasize sex, it errs in another way--underemphasizing marriage, or at least its sanctity and sacredness. 

Reacting to the news that Joan is getting married, Dad is delirious with joy, wondering aloud when he'll be able to throw another wedding. Beth's retort? Soon. You're about due for another one, aren't you? 

Beth's father chuckles. "You refuse to fall in love, and I can't stop," he says, which suggests that getting married multiple times is, really, no biggie. For him, it's natural to fall in and out of love with the alacrity of a Chinchilla.

When Beth is on the brink of getting married herself, she asks Pops what the secret to marriage is--trying, in essence, to learn from his mistakes. He laughs this off, too, telling her that her marriage might wind up being a lifelong love story or a depressing flop. "You're not going to know unless you try," he tells her. "The passion is in the risk."

In case you're not already racing me for the DQ buzzer, I'll rebut Pops' perspective with this: Marriage is about so much more than passion, more than risk--more than a lottery ticket where the winners get fairy-tale endings and losers find divorce attorneys. Marriage is about commitment--commitment that holds firm through the fickle vagaries of human emotion. Yes, there's risk involved in it, but marriage should never be analogous to rolling the dice in a game of chance. Rather, it's like building a house: You check the foundation, you build the angles square, you make sure the place will last a lifetime. 

That's how the greatest cities in the world worked their way into the history books, you know. Rome wasn't built in a day. Nor was it built on a bet.