Someday, I will write this Monday blog and announce that Avatar has fallen to No. 2.
But today is not that day.
Avatar continued to hold a convincing lead on the weekend’s box office charts, pulling down another $30 million to continue its march to becoming North America’s top-grossing film of all time. Mel Gibson’s R-rated Edge of Darkness crawled into the No. 2 slot with $17.1 million, according to Box Office Mojo, while another newcomer, When in Rome, debuted in third place with about $12.1 million.
Frankly, I’m surprised When in Rome did that well. It launched without a bevy of brand-name stars or a massive publicity push, so the fact it performed as well as it did may suggest movie-goers are hankering for a little bit of PG-13 romance. When you look at the releases lately, and the theaters have been awash in action and adventure and gore. When in Rome seems like a smart bit of counter-programming.
And indeed, When in Rome felt, in some respects, like a good soap: pretty sweet, refreshingly clean and completely unremarkable.
But it also left me in a bit of a lather.
See, the film, along with its normalish romcom attributes, served up a rather flighty attitude toward marriage. It suggests that the institution is inherently a gamble—a box of chocolates, in Forrest Gump lingo. “The passion is in the risk,” one of the characters says. And that sorta rubbed me the wrong way.
I wrote in my review (and you can read the whole thing here) that:
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.
It made me feel a little bad to hammer the movie on this point, since it obviously tried to be a bit cleaner than your typical romcom. Now I want to hear your take. Do you think I was too hard on the film?
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