BOTTLE SHOCK
Starring Chris Pine, Alan Rickman and Bill Pullman
Directed by Randall Miller
Written by Jody Savin,
Randall Miller and Ross Schwartz
Classification: PG
**
Wine geeks have been waiting a long time for the movie that perfectly captures their obsession.
Sideways purported to be that, but for all of the paeans to pinot noir, its heart was really in its exploration of masculine self-loathing.
Jonathan Nossiter's Mondovino, a documentary that did for viniculture what Michael Moore did for gun control and health care, died on the vine. The less said about Blood and Wine, in which Jack Nicholson plays a Miami wine dealer, the better.
Now, along comes Bottle Shock, a ham-fisted dramedy opening today about the rise of the California wine industry. For all of its intermittent, crowd-pleasing charm, oenophiles (and cinephiles, for that matter) might be better off putting their money toward a good bottle of Robert Mondavi.
Things get under way in 1976. A British caviste named Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman) contrives to put his obscure wine shop on the Parisian map by hosting a taste-testing - the "Judgment of Paris" - that will pit the widely mocked California vintages against the French. Meanwhile, in Napa Valley, a struggling lawyer-turned-vintner named Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman) is trying to create the perfect chardonnay.
The two will of course meet and butt heads, but not before a number of other plot lines unfurl and are left dangling, involving Barrett's long-haired slacker son Bo (Chris Pine), his Mexican pal and putative competitor Gustavo (Freddy Rodriguez) and a comely intern named Sam (a frequently bra-less Rachael Taylor).
This is all based on a true story, though its familiar narrative arc is straight from the triumph-of-the-underdog playbook (the film is being billed as a Rocky for the wine-sipping set). Director Randall Miller (Nobel Son) does his best to complicate this predictability, but the scattershot screenplay - co-written by his frequent collaborator, Jody Savin - constantly bumps up again its own lack of nuance. Worse, it traffics incessantly in mundane stereotypes: the fuddy-duddy Englishman (much is made of Spurrier's anguish when first encountering guacamole and KFC), the can-do Americans and the twee, xenophobic French. All in good fun, of course, except it's not. Miller frequently resorts to repetitious aerial shots of green-and-gold Napa - distraction, padding or kickbacks from a travel industry association?
Rickman and Pullman's mannered, off-kilter performances are at odds, thankfully, with the film's mild confusion. Both actors seem like they're in a different movie, or that they wish they were. Hammy or not, Rickman's fiendish line readings (when tasting a white wine, he pronounces the word "peach" like he's describing a particularly louche sex act) are one of the movie's few delights.
If he were characterizing Bottle Shock, I can only imagine how his lip would curl when describing its flavours: dull, unnecessarily diffuse, with a top-note of aged cheese.
***
The wine critic's take
Let's deal with the film's inaccuracies and anachronisms first: "Bacon fat" is not a flavour commonly used to describe white wine; big-bowl wineglasses were unknown in California in the 1970s; and cellar hands in real life do not resemble Rachael Taylor, or wear itty-bitty cut-off overalls (not in this wine critic's extensive vineyard travels, anyway).
Still, I enjoyed Bottle Shock in an easy-drinking, $15-merlot sort of way. Though a tad disjointed and squarely populist, it towers over bigger-budget, sappy white zinfandels of the genre such as A Good Year, starring the tragically miscast Russell Crowe, and French Kiss, featuring Kevin Kline staggering through a maudlin script in a painful, fake French accent. All praise to Alan Rickman, I say. His performance as Steven Spurrier, a man of my acquaintance, is worth five Crowes and 10 Klines.
If there's a legitimate wine-geek quibble against Bottle Shock, it's in its sins of omission. The story of the winning red wine in the famous 1976 Judgment of Paris tasting, Stag's Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon, is completely overlooked in this narrow tale of the victorious Napa Valley chardonnay, Chateau Montelena.
Worse, the movie bowdlerizes the chardonnay's real-life winemaker, Mike Grgich, the Croatian-born immigrant who had a falling out with Montelena co-owner Jim Barrett soon after making the wine. Grgich, now 85, went on to start his own Napa venture with an heir to the Hills Bros. coffee fortune. If you ever see an $80 bottle of Grgich Hills Chardonnay, grab it. And don't mind the vintage; any year would be more complex and enduring than Bottle Shock.
Beppi Crosariol is The Globe and Mail's wine critic.
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