A Good Year CCast : Russell
Crowe, Abbie Cornish, Albert Finney, Marion Cotillard, Didier Bourdon

Director:
Ridley Scott

Rating: PG-13
for language, sexual content

Running time:
118 minutes
   The kindest way to look at Ridley Scott's A Good Year is as a kind of vacation for famously intense Russell Crowe -- a chance for the high-strung Australian to lay down his sword and shield and kick back with a glass of undemanding vin ordinaire. It's refreshing to see him not straining for awards recognition, to contentedly inhabit a stock romantic comedy character, the workaholic bully who, at the end of the day, finally realizes the need to stop and smell the roses, that you can't take it with you and all the other cliched preachments that soothe the masses and against which it is so wearying to constantly do battle.
   So let RC and RS have this one; let it bring in the crowds and generate the ahs, let the critics cry sellout if they must. A lot of grandmothers will love this one, just as they love the Peter Mayle novel from which it is no doubt faithfully adapted. (I can't read Mayle myself, my heart is too black.)
   So what if the critics who saw the film at the Toronto International Film Festival all but booed it, as though it were a personal affront? Which it wasn't, because A Good Year, like most movies, was made without one thought to what the critics might say or think about it. It's meant to be the sort of movie that doesn't need critics, just big, splashy, sun-dappled television ads and gay appearances on the morning chat shows during opening week to make it happen. No doubt the movie was focus-grouped and CG twinkles were added to darling Russell's eyes in post-production. For anyone who doesn't know it yet, Hollywood isn't in the business of making cinema anymore (if it ever was), it's in the business of making (and selling ) product.
   If you doubt that for a second, then you need to see A Good Year. It's this year's mustsee movie for starry-eyed cinephiles who secretly suspect that the people who make movies are really interested in making something like popular art.
   But really, does A Good Year hurt anyone?
   Although I think it does -- settling for movies this derivative, flaccid and hedged is symptomatic of an enervated society that ought to demand better of itself -- let's pretend it doesn't and that "cute" and "pretty" are two of the best qualities to which we might aspire. Crowe, dragging enough extra weight around that it's plausible when another character calls his character fat, is certainly cute enough, even as his snarling Trumpish stereotype blusters at his staff of arbitrage "lab rats." And Marion Cotillard, Abbie Cornish and the French countryside certainly qualify as pretty, though in the denatured, hazy, soft-focus style of a Thomas Kinkade landscape.
   An old French couple and Crowe's wacky Paki Girl Friday -- lovely Archie Panjabi, who is the best thing in the movie and deserves better -- are cute. Albert Finney is cute. So is Tom Hollander. Lots of cute. Lots of pretty. Like Chocolat!
   Take these elements, make up your own story. Chances are it will be more interesting than the by-the-numbers redemption fable A Good Year recounts. Think of it as Under the Tuscan Sky rewritten for Crowe in place of Diane Lane. I wish I could claim that as an original thought, but it's actually pretty banal. It's how I described the film right after I'd seen it -- and it's how I've seen it described in print by at least two other critics. And it's probably how the people who made it think about it.
   It's harmless. If by harmless you mean zombifying and cynical.
   

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

This story was published Friday, November 10, 2006