Jim Carrey wears a Rolex Submariner

Tom Popper is mid-pitch when the watch shows, both hands thrown up in the selling gesture that is the whole character, a slick Manhattan real-estate man working a room while Carla Gugino's character looks on. On his raised left wrist sits a two-tone Rolex Submariner, steel and yellow gold, its gold bezel and gold-centered bracelet catching the light.

Mark Waters directed Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011), very loosely from Richard and Florence Atwater's 1938 children's book, with Jim Carrey as a developer whose ordered life comes apart when he inherits six penguins from his late, estranged adventurer father. The two-tone Rolesor Submariner suits the pre-penguin version of the man. It is the dressier, more openly moneyed cousin of the all-steel diver, the one that reads boardroom rather than dive boat. The dial text and reference never resolve on screen, so what is certain is the brand and the steel-and-gold metal, not a single model.

That metal still narrows things. Rolex introduced the steel-and-gold Submariner Date in 1988 and carried it into the ceramic-bezel era from 2009, so either generation is period-correct for a 2011 film. And the staging does the rest: the watch sits in the very hand Popper throws up to sell himself, the most visible object in the gesture.