A Good Year

[KLAXXON]

Shallow City boy Max Skinner (Crowe) discovers that his favourite uncle (Finney) has died, leaving him his mansion and Provence vineyard. Max heads to the south of France to sell them off quick, but fond childhood memories and wranglings with the locals conspire to send his plan awry.




Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe must love the fact that their first collaboration since Gladiator couldn’t be less similar to the sword ’n’ sandal epic that revived the former’s A-list career and launched the latter’s. “They didn’t expect us to do this,” you can almost hear them chortling. Well, there are some similarities: in both films, Russell Crowe owns a vineyard, in both he’s called Max (sort of) and, uh, that’s it. A Good Year is an entirely different bottle of plonk: rosé rather than claret, if you want to stretch a metaphor.
 
But while it’s all well and good to see them together again, the material doesn’t prove a fit for either. Crowe’s not attempted comedy since the disastrous Mystery, Alaska and Scott’s only previous tussle with the genre was the uneven Matchstick Men (unless you count Hannibal). The problem’s not so much that A Good Year is a comedy per se; rather that it’s one of those very gentle, breezy little comedies — you know, the kind your mum likes to watch after the Sunday roast — which require a light touch, a feel for the flippant and, ideally, an undercurrent of self-knowing absurdity to make them truly appealing. None of this is evident in either Crowe’s performance or Scott’s direction. There’s a forced jauntiness, a sense of careful calculation whizzing away behind the comedy beats, from Crowe’s intense pratfalls as Max tries to escape a derelict swimming pool, to his plummy exclamations of “bollocks” at every available opportunity.
 
Quite simply, Crowe and Scott are just too heavyweight. There is some novelty value in seeing Crowe squeezing his burly frame into the kind of role usually reserved for Hugh Grant or Colin Firth, but it soon wears off. The film does at least look great — who better than Scott to shoot the dusty villages and sun-snogged vistas of Bouche-du-Rhône? — and works best in its more sombre moments, as Max’s deeply buried, Freddie Highmore-shaped soul is exhumed via a series of oddly-timed flashbacks.
 
That A Good Year’s attempts at humour fall flat is also the fault of the script: there’s not a single good gag in here. Max’s smarmy quips, his rosbif-versus-frog sparring with shifty vintner Roussel (Didier Bourdon), the daffy maid who’s forever a breath away from squealing,


A Good Year is a sweet comedy from the Gladiator team of Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott. No you did not misread that sentence — the Gladiator team has tapped into Crowe’s debonair and frothy side. Those of you who are shocked by this turn of events should hit Netflix and order a couple of Mr. Crowe’s early 1990s-era pictures from Australia. He showed a deft touch for comedy in the movies Proof and The Sum of Us. Crowe has located his funnybone again in a conventional but engaging romantic comedy, filmed on location in the wine country of Provence, France.
Crowe is Max Skinner, a London-based financial whiz and a real jerk, who is annoyed that his greedy pursuit of more wealth is interrupted by the death of his grandfather Henry (Albert Finney). Henry has left him his vineyard in France. Max plans a quick trip to sell the estate and get back to London, but in classic stop-and-smell-roses-fashion, his trip brings back pleasant memories of his childhood (Freddy Highmore in flashbacks). The longer Max stays — including a romance with the feisty Fanny (Marion Cotillard), and bonding with a sister (Abbie Cornish) he didn’t know existed — the more his high-powered life back home becomes an unpleasant alternative to country living.
Scott and Crowe have created a small-scale film that explores their desire to take a break from high-powered Hollywood moviemaking and chill out in Provence.



When you think of Ridley Scott, you think of action movies. From the science fiction “Blade Runner” and “Alien” to costume epics “Gladiator” and “Kingdom of Heaven,” Scott has gotten a reputation for stylish big budget epics. But then again everybody needs a vacation from the usual, like David Mamet doing a G-rated period piece or Wes Craven doing a two-hanky drama about an inner city violin teacher. So Scott is doing a light romantic comedy about the joys of wine and the Province region of France.

Max Skinner(Russell Crowe) is a stockbroker in the Gilbert Gecko mold. He first coming in for work to do what he does best, manipulating the market and making tons of money for his company and himself in a morally ambiguous way. He has just done that when he's informed by his assistant Emma(Archie Panjabi) that his Uncle Henry(Albert Finney), from whom he has become estranged and hasn't seen for years, has just died, and as his sole heir, has to fly down to Province immediately. This brings on the first in a series of flashbacks, where eleven-year-old Max (Freddie Highmore) and Uncle Henry converse about life, love and the art of winemaking.


Getting down there, our hero gets a tiny car and meets some people from his past, the caretakers of Henry's chateau(Didier Bourdon and Isabelle Candelier), who are worried what might happen when and if Max sells the place. Due to the questionability of our hero's actions, he's suspended for a week by the British SEC, and is forced to spend a week in the south of France.

So while he's trapped in all that beautiful scenery, there's a budding relationship with the lovely restaurateur Nathalie Auzet(Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), which goes on a remarkably standard romantic comedy arc and the sudden appearance of his maybe cousin Christie(Abbie Cornish) just before his best friend and real estate salesman Charlie (Tom Hollander) shows up.

It's so goddamned cute you almost want to puke, but you don't. This is the most charming movie of the year, and it comes within an inch of being too sweet to stand, but it doesn't get there. It stays in that territory of pure grace where you laugh and cry in all the right places and don't feel the least part manipulated. This is a great movie, possibly one of the great romantic comedies of the decade.





Freddie Highmore ...  Young Max Skinner
Albert Finney ...  Uncle Henry Skinner
Russell Crowe ...  Max Skinner
Rafe Spall ...  Kenny
Archie Panjabi ...  Gemma
Richard Coyle ...  Amis
Ben Righton ...  Trader #1
Patrick Kennedy ...  Trader #2
Ali Rhodes ...  20-Something Beauty
Daniel Mays ...  Bert the Doorman
Nila Aalia ...  Newscaster #1
Stephen Hudson ...  Newscaster #2
Giannina Facio ...  Maitre D'
Tom Hollander ...  Charlie Willis
Lionel Briand ...  Rental Car Employee




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