Ridley Scott  (2006)

‘A romantic comedy by Ridley Scott’:  it doesn’t quite compare with ‘Garbo laughs’ but his output isn’t conspicuously humorous so I suppose it’s some kind of new departure.  A Good Year is about Max (Russell Crowe), a selfish bastard of a City trader in London, who inherits his uncle’s vineyard in Provence.  I fell asleep for about ten minutes and gave up a good half hour before the end but I imagine the experience improves Max’s character, as well as assuring his future love life.  (One of the few striking features of the film is that the love interest is played by Marion Cotillard – whose name which meant little to audiences outside France when A Good Year was released but who has come a long way in a short time since.)

In a prologue featuring the uncle (Albert Finney) and the infant Max (Freddie Hillmore), the uncle says that comedy is all about timing.   Ridley Scott’s idea of comedy is to do things like speed up the film to Keystone Cops tempo for a few seconds and have his actors mug and smirk throughout (they include good people like Rafe Spall).  An example of the lapidary repartee, which comes in a phone call from Max in Provence to a colleague, Charlie (Tom Hollander), in London:

‘Max: Is there a law in France against shagging your cousin?

Charlie:  Only if she’s ugly.’

I can believe City traders talk to each other like that; I can’t believe Ridley Scott doesn’t expect us to find it funny.   I remember seeing the trailer for A Good Year at the cinema and thinking Russell Crowe’s English accent as Max was amusing because the actor was so aware that it was accomplished.    Even though Crowe mucking about is a lot less hard to take than Scott letting his hair down, the trailer is still the best way to see his performance.

The early scenes of A Good Year in the City’s square mile bring to mind the hectic, overdone beginning of Local Hero (its one weak spot), set in the commercial world of Houston, where the Peter Riegert character makes a living.  Riegert plays a Mac but he’s no relation of Crowe’s Max and I didn’t spot any further resemblances between the two pictures.   When Max changes location and lifestyle, he doesn’t go to a place of eccentric mystery:  he heads for somewhere not just already known to him but wearisomely familiar to anyone in Britain who’s turned on a television in the last decade or more.  (Marc Klein’s screenplay is adapted from a novel by Peter-A Year in Provence-Mayle.)  Provence is photographed by Philippe Le Sourd to look irresistibly beautiful – but impersonally so:  we don’t see the place through Max’s eyes and might as well be watching a very long commercial.  The landscape is, though, somewhat disfigured by the alarming caricatures that inhabit it, including the winemaker M Duflot (Didier Bourdon) and his wife (Isabelle Candelier).  The only question this despicably boring film raised in my mind was whether the look of the place caused even more of the British middle classes to buy properties in Provence or whether the prospect of the locals, as presented by Ridley Scott, scared them off.

12 July 2009