This was a celebratory-gathering movie for a group of people I know yesterday. We had completed a project, and wanted to go out and do something. This movie was the overwhelming choice of the women in the group. I chose to tag along, though I had no feeling for the movie one way or another. I wouldn’t have chosen it but I didn’t feel I was being dragged to it, either. I thought bailing out of the event would be anti-social, and I wanted to hang out with the group and honor the completion of the project, so I didn’t argue.
And so here is my reaction to the film.
A Good Year will be an excellent moviegoing experience for anybody who has never seen a movie before. The scenery is gorgeous. The actors are charming. And the story is puerile, patronizing schlock.
It’s about a selfish, shallow asshole who, despite having made a ton of money in the London stock market, has, and don’t be too shocked, somehow failed to find happiness. He’s wealthy, he has his pick of disposable bedmates, but he’s just not satisfied, y’know? Then a crotchety old relative, whom he hasn’t seen in ten years but at whose French estate he spent his childhood summers, dies, leaving him said estate. He goes to the estate to get started on selling it, whereupon memories of his happy youth wash over him, causing him to question his life. He also meets a smoking hot girl in the neighboring village.
So, naturally, he screws her, breaks her heart, razes the estate, sells the land, and goes back to London and resumes his life without a second thought. Right?
Of course not.
I spent the first third of the movie becoming more and more dismayed that such predictable drivel would have gotten such high-profile attention from the movie establishment. The asshole is played by Russell Crowe, and the director is Ridley Scott; the producer is Branko Lustig. Now, I know this kind of stuff gets made all the time, but it’s usually second-tier material, barely a cut above a television movie, made by up-and-comers who want to prove to the studio system that they can cheerfully grind out crowd-pleasing pablum on schedule and on budget. (Consider Diane Lane in Under the Tuscan Sun, a movie to which A Good Year bears a very strong resemblance. She was a reliable actor before that movie; she was a star afterward. Unfaithful got her a lot of attention; Tuscan Sun cemented her public profile. Crowe, I would have thought, doesn’t need this kind of help.) So while movies like this are hardly a rarity, the true A-list project, usually, works on a different level. They’re just as obvious and predictable, yes, but they’re obvious and predictable in a different way. This, by contrast, was pure hokum.
Then I spent the second third of the movie reflecting on the need of the mainstream audience to be spoonfed formula narratives, where the familiarity and predictability is not only not a negative but is indeed the basis for enjoyment. This was triggered by a moment in the film where Crowe’s character wanders out onto a diving board over an empty swimming pool; the ancient board, of course, breaks, dropping him into a blood-spattered oubliette filled with rotating knives. No, wait, wrong movie; I mean, dropping him into the empty pool, face-first in a squelching mound of grime, no less. I heard an audience member, off to one side: “I knew that was going to happen.” The tone of voice was not disappointed, but satisfied, smug even. This person felt smart for having anticipated the plot twist, which is, it goes without saying, exactly the point.
Then I spent the final third of the movie becoming dismayed again: Is it so hard for people to recognize when they’re being condescended to? Do people really not know when they’re having their asses kissed? The movie is filled with little moments that are clearly designed to pay off later in the most obvious manner; why, do you imagine, are we shown Max’s skills at forging Henry’s writing, and who, do you suppose, is behind the breathtaking boutique wine label whose mysteriously unknown provenance is discussed at length? These things are not in the movie because they will be stunning surprises later: they’re in the movie so we can see them coming, and so we can feel intelligent for anticipating later developments, for being ahead of the plot. Do viewers truly not get how patronizing that is? Don’t they sense the smarminess inherent in a movie like this patting them on the head and saying, “Thank you for your nine dollars, you’re a genius, yes you are, oh yes that’s right you are”?
And in order to be delivered this ridiculous bit of emotional fortification, are people really capable of overlooking the painfully obvious problems with the story? Now, I’m not talking about all the little technical details the movie gets wrong; big chunks of the story are set in high-pressure Financial London and in French Wine Country, for example, and neither world is even close to being accurate in the movie. No, I mean the big stuff: Russell Crowe and the Smoking Hot Village Girl are supposed to be the same age, as revealed in a flashback showing them both as children. But look at them; there’s obviously ten years between them. She’s thirty, maybe, and he’s clearly north of forty, unless he’s spent the last fifteen years living in a rock tumbler.
Am I really that out of touch? Are people so insecure, so desperate for validation, that they will allow themselves to be metaphorically tongued in their special private places by this brazenly lipsticked pig?
Oh, who am I kidding? In a world where Dan Brown is a best-selling author, do I even need to ask?
Anyway, if you’ve never seen a movie before, or if you’re desperately plagued by secret insecurities, go check out A Good Year, and feel good about yourself. But if you have an ounce of taste or intelligence… avoid, avoid, avoid.