Rating:
* *
Verdict:
Neither comedy nor drama and mostly banal.
If this film were a wine, it would be described as lacking structure, never mind subtlety or depth. It's based on a true story - a blind tasting organised in Paris by an English wine merchant in which French chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon were measured against the same varieties from the then-fledgling Californian industry. This was 1976, the year of the US bicentenary, and, as if God were smiling on the Land of the Free, the Americans won. Debutant director Miller has fermented these basic facts into a film that follows the fortunes of the winning chardonnay, but it is a challenge for the audience because it never knows what it wants to be.
The screenplay has had at least four sets of hands laid on it (all at the same time, one suspects) and the result is a mess. When vintner Jim Barrett (Pullman) and his son Bo (Pine, the new
Star Trek
's Captain Kirk in a truly appalling wig) are centre-frame, it's a David-and-Goliath battler story with Oedipal overtones; when the focus is on the organising oenophile Steven Spurrier (Rickman), it's a slightly goofy Brit-meets-Yank comedy in which, one suspects, the actor's self-mocking tone is down to some of the lines he has to utter ("It all begins with the soil, the vine, the grape," he says at one point, which sounds like three starting points to me).
Adding to the mixture is Taylor, who arrives as an intern and quickly assumes her assigned role as a pretty prize for a couple of the younger males to lock horns over.
History, of course, gives the story a predictable ending, but there was no requirement to make it so banal.
Spurrier, whom wine guru Jancis Robinson describes as a "puzzlingly under-celebrated pioneer", has remarked that scarcely a word of the film is true.
That, of course, is no bad thing in itself: fictionalisation can do whatever it likes to a story. But it needs to
ring
true and scarcely a moment of the movie does that.
Peter Calder
Cast:
Alan Rickman, Chris Pine, Bill Pullman, Rachael Taylor, Freddy Rodriguez
Director:
Randall Miller
Running time:
110 mins
Rating:
M (low-level offensive language)