Faizon Love wears an unidentified watch

Late in Couples Retreat, the camera holds on two men standing at the edge of a singles party, both in buttoned shirts while everyone around them dances in swimsuits. Faizon Love is the one on the left, in green plaid and thin wire glasses, hands folded low in front of him. On that near wrist is a chronograph: a steel case, a dark dial, three sub-registers, a dark strap. It sits in focus and it is plainly a real watch, and it gives up nothing else. Nothing on the dial resolves into a name, so it stays unidentified.

Love plays Shane, who arrives at the island resort called Eden recently separated from his wife and paired instead with Trudy, a girlfriend of twenty. Eden runs its couples through scheduled therapy on one half of the island and keeps a singles party going on the other, the two halves kept from mixing. Trudy tires of the therapy side and slips across to the party. Shane goes after her, which is how the camera catches him here, a grown man in street clothes at the rail of a crowd half his age.

A chronograph is built to measure elapsed time, started and stopped by hand. Shane wears one through a story that runs the other way: he comes to Eden separated from his wife Jennifer and leaves having reconciled with her. Beside him, Jason Bateman wears a steel dive watch, the instantly recognizable kind. For the film's overseas release, Universal cut Love and his co-star Kali Hawk, the cast's only Black couple, from the poster, and Love sued the studio over it in 2020.