By Armond White

A Good Year

Directed by Ridley Scott

Reteaming for the first time since 2000’s Gladiator, director Ridley Scott and actor Russell Crowe have made A Good Year. It might be called a love story, as Gladiator could have been called an adventure movie. But just as that ancient-times video game/movie was long on synthetic spectacle and short on adventure, A Good Year stretches, distends and cutesifies its narrative nuances without ever coming close to love of land or of other people.

Now the fattest of fat cats, Scott and Crowe had to make a movie commensurate with their Oscar-winning egos. They’ve inflated the story of a business man who remembers his childhood heritage, the simple pleasures of food, companionship and nature into a near-epic-sized travelogue celebrating, like Gladiator, the fanciest notions of European imperialist luxe.

Crowe plays London bond trader Max Skinner who is called away from his high-tech, reflecting-glass, supercapitalist cage to learn that his favorite uncle Henry (Albert Finney) has died, bequeathing him a rustic Provencal farmhouse. When Max goes back to inspect the inheritance for possible profitable sale, he—surprise!—falls in love with it. Memories fall into place; the sun outshines gloomy, dark-suited London; and a spectrum of jeune filles, some who may or may not be related, beckon his loins. 

A cinema hick might look at this vacation-movie formula as a respite—a Three Coins in the Fountain-type celebration of widescreen color in tourist locales, a tired-businessman’s animistic version of A New World—but only a fool would give Scott or Crowe credit for it. A Good Year is little more than a big-budget, unoriginal time-killer. It’s easier to picture Scott and Crowe sharing a long spa weekend, rather than working through the complications of creating a movie with a plain narrative and basic emotions. All that are harvested in this vineyard folly are yawns.

You could reasonably expect something more daring from this celebrated pair, Maximus and Extravagansus. Perhaps a completely fabricated romantic revelry full of artificially blooming CGI flowers and blood-ripe vineyards as fantastically unreal and compelling as those memorable fantasy landscapes in What Dreams May Come. What else could a luxuriant image-maker like Ridley Scott be good for? There’s potential in the plot, based on an idea Scott conceived with his friend, travel writer Peter Mayle (A Year in Provence): They’d outdo the wine region character study of Sideways by making a countryside movie that exulted in Scott’s knack for visual opulence. Blue-gray urban London would give way to the verdant, golden South of France. A romantic sense of English glory would be restored to its original name—Albion. 

But the “pleasantness” of A Good Year is insultingly benign. It offers a relaxed Ridley, a Crowe without tension—neither makes up for the punishing inanity of Gladiator. The Max Skinner role reveals something worse than brutish in Crowe. It shows some stingy working-class yearning for “the good life.” It brings out his inner prig. (Just imagine him making a tourist movie this condescendingly snide about New Zealand.) Skinner’s return to his posh roots denies the cultural exploration that made Bob Rafelson’s Stay Hungry (about American Jeff Bridge’s return to his Southern roots) so valuable. A Good Year lacks that film’s regional authenticity and Rafelson’s timely need to connect with sturdier values. This is just a damn vacation movie like Under the Tuscan Sun, but with a plethora of uncosmopolitan cultural stereotypes at every turn. Ridley Scott doesn’t show range but his usual, hack-director’s lack of commitment.