Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Why Bottle Shock (2008) is a pretty bad movie

Bottle Shock tells the story of two upstart California wines that trumped their more established French counterparts at a supposedly historic blind tasting in Paris in 1976.

The California set are represented by Jim Barrett (Bill Pullman), a San Franciso lawyer turned vinter and his hippy son Bo and their employee Gustavo (his father was a field hand and Gustavo has soil and grapes inscribed deep in his DNA and brain circuitry. I hope they donate his mutant brain to science). They are joined by Sam – an intern who everybody assumed would be a man but she proves to be a bonafide blondie starlet type, wearing what she thinks a 70s person would wear. She also features in the films’s most clichéd scenes.

There are two other key characters: A British wine dealer, Steven Spurrier, who wants to find a way in to the snobby world of French wine expertise and his friend, Maurice, an expat from Milwaukee. Spurrier is the founder of Academie du Vin – an outfit that purports to educate the palate of philistines. He perhaps delivers one of only two convincing lines in the whole film—I’ll get to that later.

Maurice convinces Spurrier that he must try the wines from California and let the Frenchies test them as a way of garnering some publicity for his academie. So Spurrier sets off to California and we next see him with a flat tire on the way to Napa Valley. Quite predictably, Jim Barrett happens to be driving by and they have a brief discussion about wine where Spurrier succeeds in annoying Barrett.

At least their animosity leads to this very convincing exchange later on in the film:

“Jim Barrett: Why don't I like you?

Steven Spurrier: Because you think I'm an arsehole. And I'm not, really. I'm just British and, well... you're not.”

But other than this clever piece of dialogue and many long shots of sun-kissed Napa valley grapes on vine, this film feels like a roughly drawn caricature of a really good story. It has an inherent flakiness from the get-go that flattens even the deep philosophies that it seeks to propagate about wine.

Remember that scene in Sideways where a softly glowing Virginia Marsden tells Paul Giamatti why she loves wine? Well, Bottle Shock tries something similar in the scene where Barrett discovers that Gustavo is secretly making his own wine and fires him. It’s supposed to be moving but it just made me roll my eyes.

“Gustavo Brambila: You people, you think you can just buy your way into this. You cannot do it that way.

Jim Barrett: Alright...

Gustavo Brambila: You have to have it in your blood, you have to grow up with the soil underneath your nails, the smell of the grapes in the air that you breathe. The cultivation of the vine was an art form. The refinement of the vine is a religion that requires pain and desire and sacrifice.”

The refinement of the vine is a religion? No amount of labored handwringing by even poor Freddy Rodriguez, who is actually a very talented actor, could rescue this bit of screenwriting.

I’ve decided to stop my review here and tell you that reading AO Scott’s review of the film in the New York Times was more fun than watching the film itself. I particularly liked his conclusion which borrows from wine-snob terminology. I wish I had thought of reviewing this film in similar terms but I didn’t, so I might as well quote Monsieur Scott.

“The filmmakers struggle to shoehorn a fascinating story about wine into some kind of screen genre or another. But Bottle Shock is unable to figure out what kind of movie it wants to be, and flops around between madcap comedy and rousing drama. To borrow a wine-snob term of art, it lacks structure. Or, to push the idiom a little further, it’s a little too sweet, with some pleasantly nutty notes and a baloney finish.”


2 comments:

eugene t. said...

i saw this on a plane. it was mildly amusing when you're stuck on a 14 hr flight to Hong Kong, but i can't imagine i'd actually pay to watch it; even if it came on cable.

the problem is it's very vanilla -- and not the good vanilla with the little black specks of bean. i agree the filmmakers forced an interesting story within the structure of a conventional triumph of the individual drama, while sanding down all the nuance that would remain in a better movie.

and what's with tasting wine out in the blazing sun? doesn't that mess with the flavor? Recall reading that the actual event took place indoors.

reportergirl said...

You're right about the mild amusement. As AO Scott says, this is a movie made with a lot of affection and little skill.
Another thing that irked me was the throwaway Bo, blondie, Gustavo love triangle. It was so random as if they had thought to introduce some drama and then thought the better of it.