A Good Landscape Photography Tour of Provence, A Not-So-Good Movie
Written: Nov 22 '06 (Updated Nov 22 '06)
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: The lovely French countryside.
Cons: Rather ineffective performance of the humor.
The Bottom Line: Worth seeing just to see how Crowe and Scott have tried to make it all happen, and you'll love the views.
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| Ed.Williamson's Full Review: A Good Year |
Well, Russell, what have we here? A Good Year, based on Peter Mayle’s novel, is a beautifully filmed romantic comedy which seems to indicate either (a) it is hard to translate some books into film, or (b) Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe, and company simply needed to shore up their bank accounts and decided to waffle through this one. In the film you get a gorgeously filmed tour of the French wine country of Provence, but unfortunately, you also get a story as thin as a glass of watered-down merlot.
Fellow epinionator mike.holmes and I, after viewing Casino Royale at the matinee showing, were so pumped from watching that film that we decided to go see A Good Year at the late show. The place where I live most of the year doesn’t have many first-run movies, and Mike and I always have a good time watching and then discussing the films, so we decided to take in this one, hoping that Scott and Crowe would have a successful collaboration after their wonderful Gladiator from a few years back, but this was far from the stature of that swords-and-sandals epic. I must confess that Mike had to nudge me awake a time or two just to keep me watching the film, as I was lulled into sleep by the pace of the story. After the credits rolled, at first we both agreed that it was “good”, as we almost always do about any film we see together, but then I started to think back on what we had seen, and as time went on I felt less and less impressed. Mike is a very perceptive and good (and Top) epinions reviewer, and he is almost always a bit more charitable with the ratings than I am, so he may feel more positive than I do about A Good Year, but differences of opinion among reviewers who even are good friends are what make the whole epinions reviewing process interesting. Incidentally, if you ever have a chance to go see a film with another epinionator, do it. I daresay you will find the exercise rewarding.
But back to the film proper. The film stars Russell Crowe as a professional financial investor in London named Max Skinner. Max lives as a master money runner in a world of crowded stock brokerages, exuberant young account executives, and computers; a high-tech world in the steel-and-glass canyons of the financial district. He seems to have a Palm Treo cell phone almost growing out of his ear. As a matter of fact, we see and hear the Palm cell phone so much in this movie I wondered at times if it ought not to have been given billing as one of the movie’s stars. Palm will get a lot of advertising mileage from this featuring.
In his youth, however, Max lived in the rural wine country of Provence with his free-spirited wine-loving Uncle Henry (Albert Finney), another Englishman like Max, who loved his French vineyard as if it were a part of his very soul. Uncle Henry, it seems, wanted Max to follow in his footsteps (and soul-steps) regarding the ownership and management of the vineyard, and when Uncle Henry dies and goes to that great wine country in the sky, he arranges for Max to more-or-less inherit the vineyard. Max travels from London to Provence to see the vineyard he remembers from his youth, and which he has inherited, and finds it overwhelmingly beautiful but the buildings and grounds in sad need of repair, although the vineyard itself is still flourishing under the caretaker Francis Duflot's (Didier Bourdon's) careful and loving hands.
Max takes one look at the situation, and he realizes that if he were to try to manage the vineyard he would be giving up his exciting and lucrative world back in London, and quickly decides to sell the old array of wine-producing fields; to take the money and run. Yet slowly, he becomes enchanted with the vineyard, due to two women and the ambiance of the Mediterranean land and culture around him. One of these women is the housekeeper Christie Roberts (Abbie Cornish), and more tellingly, he is influenced by a stunningly lovely young owner of a local cafe named Fannie Chenal (Marion Cotillard) who steals Max’s heart away in a fashion that lends itself to the fantasies that men all over the world have about pretty French girls.
Max has to deal with the World He Left Behind in London, of course, and that fuels a great deal of the comedy here. It is always a challenge to make a sea-change adjustment into a new life, and the bumpy road Max must travel has many possibilities for comic moments.
Unfortunately, Russell seems pretty much at sea playing a man making this sea-change. Most of the witty laughs come from Finney, and he necessarily passes from the scene very quickly on, so that Russell, his cell phone, and the other actors must carry on the story. But it is a stretch. I’m not quite sure if this is because Russell, a fine actor in many other genres of film is not yet an accomplished comic actor (at least in this kind of gentle comedy), or whether Scott is a bit yet frail in crafting comedy, or if it had something to do with the subtlety of the story. Yet something seems to be lacking here. And therefore things feel a little thin.
Even so, the rich autumnal scenery of Provence, and the smiles of Marion Cotillard and Abbie Cornish, make the picture in many ways a visual delight. Those morsels of beauty may compensate for a great deal for the casual moviegoer.
But on balance, this is perhaps not one of the great films of Crowe’s or Scott’s careers. A more delicate touch all the way through would have, perhaps, given us a much more humorous feeling. And maybe, just maybe, this reviewer would have had better luck staying awake during the proceedings.
Three Stars/***
Recommended:
Yes
Movie Mood: Funny Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: A few glitches, but mostly complete.
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Epinions.com ID:
Ed.Williamson
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 - Top 200 |
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Member: Ed Williamson
Location: Way Out West, USA
Reviews written: 605
Trusted by: 315 members
About Me:
Fight 'em till Hell freezes over, then fight 'em on the ice!
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