So, after a long week, my college roommate and I got together to order Chinese food, drink beer, and watch something dopey and humiliating. Names will be withheld to protect the innocent, but I will confess that we ended up watching When In Rome.
It's an incredibly terrible movie. It features the world's least plausible wedding. Danny DeVito plays a sausage king. There is a New York restaurant where the meal takes place entirely in the dark. We are forced to endure Jon Heder as a magician. I began anticipating lines of dialogue full minutes before they were uttered. A CENTRAL PLOT POINT INVOLVES JOSH DUHAMEL HAVING BEEN HIT BY LIGHTNING. The only overarching virtue of the movie is to wish we'd get more adult movies that plausibly and interestingly involved genuine magic. The whole thing zips by in ninety minutes, leaving no room for any sort of emotional development whatsoever.
And yet, the whole thing is this fascinating exercise in acting. It's basically like watching a bunch of very talented people work their bored way through prompts they know they can nail. Duhamel really should do comedy more of the time: dude can move, and he could learn a few things from Steve Martin because he could actually, maybe execute. DeVito is really wonderfully impressive at expressing a lovely, momentary melancholy. Anjelica Huston is our most marvelously imperious actress working today—it really would be fun watching her square off with Helen Mirren in something. Kristen Bell is fine in the movie, but it illustrates the risky point she's at in her career where she's doing awful, put-upon, relatable-girl crap, when really she should be doing weird and substantive and funny things. Seriously, she and Sarah Michelle Gellar should team up to run a private eye's office or something, and find mutual career rehab.
When In Rome isn't remotely worth watching for the small, weird actorly pleasures it provides. Not everything can be elevated above its ridiculousness. But I do think this is one of the compensatory joys of watching like a critic. Sometimes, you just see the gem of craft buried away in the pile of trash, and you get to feel a magpie-like joy in having found it.