Bruce Greenwood wears an unidentified watch

In Endless Love, Bruce Greenwood stands at the left of the frame, half turned from the camera, a watch on the wrist that hangs near his pocket. He plays Hugh Butterfield, the father who spends the movie trying to keep his daughter Jade (Gabriella Wilde) away from David Elliot (Alex Pettyfer), the working-class boy she falls for the summer after high school. Here David has come to the door with a bouquet in one hand and a bag across his shoulder, Jade beside him, Hugh's wife Anne (Joely Richardson) at the other side. Hugh is the one the camera catches looking the boy over.

The watch is a plain one: a round polished-steel case on a dark leather strap, a black dial carrying a full ring of cream Arabic numerals, a crown at three, no date. It shows the time and nothing else. The still is sharp enough to count the rivets on his Levi's and the weave of his belt, but the dial meets the camera at an angle the light won't give up, and the maker's name never resolves. No public source names the watch either, so it stays unidentified here.

Shana Feste directed the film, a second pass at Scott Spencer's 1979 novel after Franco Zeffirelli's 1981 version with Brooke Shields. Universal released it on February 14, 2014, and the date was the point; it cost about 20 million dollars and took in roughly 35 million. Much of its running time is Hugh managing other people's clocks, the internship Jade is meant to start, the nights David is and is not allowed in the house. By the studio's own plot he loses both of those fights, and by the end his wife has left him too. The watch still reads the time, plainly, the one exact thing left to a man who cannot hold the rest.