It Could Happen to You 
                                                 
Director: Andrew Bergman
Year: 1994
Rating: 5.0
This feels like an attempt to create a 1930/40's screwball romance and for about twenty-minutes it succeeds admirably. Then the fizz is out of the bottle and it flattens out like an over cooked soufflé. It is easy to picture this starring Jean Arthur and Jimmy Stewart with an assist from Henry Travers, Ward Bond and Evelyn Ankers with Frank Capra directing. But instead, this has Nicolas Cage, Bridget Fonda, Rosie Perez, Isaac Hayes, Wendell Pierce and Andrew Bergman directing. That is certainly not a bad cast but it isn't Arthur and Stewart. And definitely not Capra who could have brought out a lot more warmth and emotion.



Cage plays Charlie, a cop so honest that if he found a nickel on the sidewalk, he would try and find the owner. And when he gets home, he plays stickball with the neighborhood kids. Stickball? Who the hell plays stickball anymore? He has been married to his high school sweetheart for ten years. Muriel is played by Rosie Perez and is the villain in the piece. But it is Rosie Perez who I always adore and she cracks me up even if the villain. She has those small carnivorous teeth that make me think that if she found you dead in her apartment, she would snack on you all day as she watched soaps.  Over the years the wife has become a harridan who never stops complaining and kvetching about their middle-class existence in Queens. She works in a nail salon. In other words, the fire is gone.



She has Charlie buy a lottery ticket and when he and his partner (Wendell Pierce) are served at a diner and he has no money for the tip to the waitress, he promises her half the lottery if he wins anything. She is Yvonne played by the delightful Bridget Fonda who is down on her luck with a bozo husband (Stanley Tucci) that she is trying to divorce. She is nicer than an ice cream float and the customers love her. Ah, what I would do for a diner like that in NYC now. And Bridget serving me. Most diners have disappeared and it is hard as hell to find a good triple-decker sandwich. She is so sweet that she even kisses a customer with AIDS on the cheek. It is clear from minute one that they are meant for each other and will raise a dozen very nice children someday and take in stray cats.



Well, he wins the lottery, their share being $4 million which 30 years later doesn't seem that much - after taxes - two million each. The scene plays out perfectly when he tells her and she starts scooping free ice cream for everyone. The papers make it a big story. Cop tips waitress $2 million. The wife is not so happy and everything after that is like playing tic-tac-toe. You know exactly what is going to happen and it does, but you have to wade through it. He takes the kids to Yankee Stadium (now gone) with Yvonne and they hand out tokens at the subway (the token also long gone) while Muriel goes on an extravagant shopping spree.



Clearly, two million went a lot further back then. Perez and Bridget are fine in this but Cage decides to underplay Charlie to the point where he has the charm of a fence post. Maybe he was trying to do Stewart or Fonda, the everyman American - but he is so dull that I was worried I would go into a coma every time he talks. Along with subway tokens and diners, the screwball comedy or romance is gone as well and I can't explain why. Have we gotten too jaded, too cynical, lost our innocence to do them right anymore? I expect so.