Dir. Randall Miller, US, 2008, 109 mins
Cast: Chris Pine, Alan Rickman, Bill Pullman
Review by Carol Allen
America it appears has not surprisingly taken to its heart this film, which celebrates the story of how in 1976 Californian wine broke the dominance of the French and became recognised as world class. Though like certain wines, the film doesn't travel that well.
Pullman plays Jim Barrett, a perfectionist wine grower in the Napa Valley, dreaming of producing a world class Chardonnay. He also has a contentious relationship with his hippy son Bo (Pine). Meanwhile in Paris English wine expert Steven Spurrier (Rickman) is getting a pretty snotty reaction from the wine establishment to his “wine academy”, an ambitious title for his small wine shop, which does no business, apart from with his best mate Maurice (Denis Farina), who keeps popping in for a free tasting though never buys anything. With Maurice's encouragement, Steven comes up with a publicity stunt, which involves him travelling to California to find some new wines for a blind wine tasting competition he's organised in Paris. When he takes a shine to Barrett's vintage the wine grower is oddly uninterested, though young Pine is eager to do business.
It's a potentially fascinating story but not very well told. The first part of the film alternates between the Californians, who are a pretty uninteresting lot and the amusing double act of Rickman and Farina in Paris. Pullman has to struggle with the underwritten role of Jim, who is inexplicably dour and grumpy, Pine looks as though he'd be more at ease with surfing rather than wine growing and pretty blonde Rachael Taylor has a non role as Sam, his love interest. The film wastes a lot of time on a blind alley of a love triangle which goes nowhere, involving them and Gustavo (Freddie Rodriguez), Bo's buddy, who works on the estate. One of the plus points of the film though is Rodriguez's performance as the young man with an amazing palate, who can identify any wine in astonishing detail and who supplements his income by getting the locals to place bets on his skills. He and his father, whose passion for opera sends out the confusing movie cliché suggestion that maybe they're Italian and not Hispanic, are also developing a promising vintage, but that too is a plotline which is left in mid air. The film also slows things down to a crawl by the camera lingering for too long on the admittedly impressive landscape. Things take a turn for the better whenever Rickman's on screen and the film does warm up towards the end, as in a sequence when Steven's not allowed by airline regulations to take more than one bottle of wine into the aircraft cabin on his journey back to Paris and his patriotic, all American fellow passengers each agree to carry one for him.
And the wine tasting climax in Paris, while predictable in outcome, is effective.
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