REVIEWED - A GOOD YEAR : Sitting through Ridley Scott's charmless comedy really does feel like a year - and we're not talking in Provence, writes Michael Dwyer
BASED on one of Peter Mayle's best-selling books about an Englishman's experiences in Provence, A Good Year proves as bland as its title. There may well have been an entertaining movie in Mayle's reminiscences, but his book has found an entirely wrong match in the Gladiator team of director Ridley Scott and actor Russell Crowe.
It begins reasonably promisingly, with a prologue in which Max Skinner (played by Freddie Highmore) is 11, precocious and already a wine connoisseur under the tutelage of his benign, vineyard-owner uncle (Albert Finney). Cut to the present, and Max (now played by Crowe) is a boorish, cynical London stock market trader surrounded by yes men and women, smugly glorying in dubious dealing that yields millions in minutes.
Inheriting his uncle's chateau and vineyard, Max's instinct is to sell off the property, but the set-up is so obvious that some moralising life lessons surely are further down the predictable menu.
Max's tutors in these matters are stock stereotypes: feisty local restaurant owner Fanny (Marion Cotillard), for whom he falls, and a Proust-spouting winemaker (Didier Bourdon) whose dog is named Tati after a director far more adept at staging farce than Scott. The heavy-handed script even contrives to shoehorn a token American woman (Abbie Cornish) onto the story.
A Good Year aspires to the jaunty insouciance that marked one of Scott's best pictures, Thelma & Louise, but it falters time and again in its eagerness to entertain - an over-extended routine as Crowe struggles to get out of a muddy, empty swimming pool is embarrassingly grating. So, too, are all the feeble double entendres, the tired references to the French as frogs and. in a couple of tennis games, the repetition of John McEnroe's infamous protest, "You cannot be serious."
The crucial problem is that, while Scott and Crowe can do serious very well indeed, they cannot be funny - certainly not on the evidence of this jaded trifle.
The scenery is lovely.
