A Good Year

The ingredients to A Good Year seem good enough. Ridley Scott is an amply talented director and Russell Crowe is a thoroughly engaging actor. You’d think reteaming them years after they dominated the Oscars together with the action epic Gladiator in a lighter, more comedic film would be a nice reunion and great bit of fun. If so, you would be really really wrong. This is such a paltry and uninspired offering and it’s made all the worse by the inherent expectations involved in seeing a film created by such talented people. It’s a clichéd story about a man who meets a pretty girl and rediscovers the joys of living his life to the fullest. The genre is more than tired by now, but many films can still pull the formula off with wit and charm (see everything Cameron Crowe has ever made). However talented Scott and Crowe are neither seems gifted with the ability to successfully enliven such lightweight material. The whole production feels cold, forced, and absent of anything other than lovely looking scenery and some nice performances by supporting actors. Essentially, it’s a Cameron Crowe movie with no soul and a shitty soundtrack.

That’s not to say that it’s a completely awful film. There is merit to its visual beauty and to some of its character dialogue here and there. However, most of the spoken words are so riddled with unnecessary intricacies and unbelievable amounts of premeditated wordiness that it’s hard to imagine anyone actually saying them spontaneously. It’s a film that’s drenched in words and visuals that are quite lush, but none of it really connects to any sense of truth. More importantly, the story is so obvious and so thin that it really would take a great deal of warmth and charm to muster any kind of enthusiasm from me. This was charmless and inauthentic. It’s pretty much a dud.

Grade: D+