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A Good Year
DIR: Ridley Scott • WRI: Marc Klein • PROD: Ridley
Scott • DOP: Philippe Le Sourd • ED: Dody Dorn •
DES: Sonja Klaus • CAST: Russell Crowe, Albert Finney,
Abbie Cornish, Marion Cotillard, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Didier
Bourdon, Tom Hollander, Freddie Highmore
Ridley Scott has returned to an intimate
portrait film with the release of A Good Year, based
on the novel by Peter Mayle. Russell Crowe stars as Max Skinner,
a stock market player who, by default, inherits the chateau
in which he spent his summers with his uncle Henry, played by
Albert Finney. Along with this comes the love interest, the
link that pulls Crowe out of the stock market of London and
into the vineyards of a French chateau.
The opening segment of the film introduces us
to Crowe's character as a child, played by Freddie Highmore
(Finding Neverland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory),
involved in a chess game in which he cheats to win and proceeds
to bask in the glory of the triumph. We are then led into
a present-day London stock firm where adult Max has evolved
into an even more conniving moneywort . After a job well done
and some stock manipulation, he returns home to his ritzy
apartment to find that his much loved uncle Henry has passed
away, and he has been summoned to France to negotiate the
will and the property. While there, he rather predictably
falls in love with a local French girl who he nearly runs
off the road with his Smart Car (the film is full of these
cheap romantic tricks when it comes to the love story). Other
major events include the chance arrival of uncle Henry's possible
daughter from America looking for her father, which further
develops the film's tri-country triangle. Overall, these subplots
can barely hold up the even weaker main plot of the film.
Production value on the film, however, is of
quite a high standard, as with all Scott films. The cinematography
is gorgeous and elegant, excluding the segments that accent
the Smart Car gimmick with choppy, Chaplinesque frame rates.
The visuals relating to the sun motif are the most moving
images in the film. The film does contain some of the most
beautiful landscape portraits of any film (always a pro in
any Scott film). I almost ached when they were over because
it meant I had to return to watching characters whose goals
and motivations are unearned. Crowe, for instance, plays a
self-proclaimed asshole (possibly based around this past summer's
tabloid articles); as for the rest of the characters, they
are just flat sketches void of any dimensionality. Old and
young Max are the only two characters with depth, because
of Crowe's motivated acting and Highmore's youthful instinct
that has made his characters so moving in his previous films.
The problems with the film inevitably
lead back to the script; great actors like Finney and Crowe
just don't have anything constant to work with. A Good
Year is just an example of a bad novel-to-film adaptation.
Redeemable qualities rest in the fact that Scott has stretched
his wings once more in the realm of personal, character-driven
directing, which will hopefully inform his next epic and push
it towards what Gladiator was and what Kingdom of
Heaven could have been. In the end it is a film made from
a middle-aged book club book. It is full of threads that are
left untied and are often forgotten about as the film progresses.
Basically, A Good Year may have been a good book, but
after watching the film the last thing you would want to do
is read it.
Kevin Hooper
Rated
12A (see IFCO
website for details)
A Good Year is released on 27th October 2006.
A
Good Year – Official website
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