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A Good Year

Review By: Stephen Snart
StephenSnart@TheCinemaSource.com

Move over Matchstick Men, Ridley Scott has a new oddball entry in his thirty year career of directing feature films. After years of directing violent, fast-paced blockbusters like Gladiator, Alien and Black Hawk Down, Scott made an abrupt segue into a comedy/drama of manners with the delightfully entertaining conman lark Matchstick Men. But with his latest directorial effort, A Good Year, Scott moves even further away from his comfort zone as the film is a light-hearted trifle set on a small wine vineyard in the South of France.

Russell Crowe plays Max Skinner, a high-powered bond trader who refers to his employees as “lab rats” and instills them with the mantra: “winning isn’t everything, it’s everything.” Max’s ruthless business sense supercedes any sort of moral order, a trait that his assistant Gemma (Archie Panjabi) calls to attention by stating, “They should bury you face down because that’s where you’re going.” But Max is a self-aware asshole and he revels in the opportunity to pillage and plunder at the expense of friends and family.

After a long day of screwing people over on the bond market, Max returns home to learn that his last remaining relative, his dear Uncle Henry (Albert Finney), has died and left Max his wine vineyard in Provence. Growing up, Max spent his summers in France, carousing around the illustrious estate with his loving Uncle. As Max grew older, he failed to maintain contact with Uncle Henry, their last correspondence being ten years prior to the death. Now that he’s a cold-blooded workaholic, he sees no use for the chateau but reluctantly travels down to Provence with the sole purpose of preparing the place for sale. Although once he arrives, he finds himself bowled over with nostalgia and for the first time in his adult life, conflict arises between his work and his personal life.

The film is an adaptation of Peter Mayle’s international bestseller of the same name. Mayle, a British-born author who recently achieved notice for a series of Provence-set books, is a writer of tremendous charm and sadly the film adaptation is unable to replicate his tenderness. What was a quaint, modern-day fairy tale on page has turned into a glib, overcooked film so hung up on causality that it lacks any of the organic grace present in Mayle’s prose. If this sounds overly harsh it’s because I’m an ardent fan of the novel and that always makes the disappointment all the more frustrating. I don’t mean to fall into the trap of attacking the inherent shortcomings of a medium-to-medium translation,