Bottle Shock

This film came out this past summer. It was never intended to be a blockbuster, but it seemed to get pretty good reviews and has a terrific cast, so I regard it as one of the overlooked gems of 2008. It's based on actual events, but I don't know enough about the history behind it to say how accurate it is. If this isn't how it all really happened, it should be, put it that way.


BOTTLE SHOCK

If you are tired of summer blockbuster action movies and the latest star-vehicle “comedies,” then the cleverly titled Bottle Shock is a late summer treat that will ease your way into the heavier fare of fall. A fictionalization of actual persons and events, Shock is the seriocomic telling of a famous 1976 winetasting contest in France in which California vintners from the Napa Valley did what was then considered the impossible: they beat their French competition by taking first place in two major categories. Proving itself equal to the world’s foremost wine culture was of great significance to the California wine industry, but director Randall Miller and his team of screenwriters choose not to treat this tale of cultural battle lines and Yankee victory over the Old World in grand patriotic manner. Rather than puffing up the event with epochal meaning, they keep their sights closely trained on the human side of the story. There’s an abundance of sweeping aerial shots of California countryside and sun-dappled portraits of sprawling vineyards, but despite the epic imagery, Bottle Shock remains small, personal, and warm. And--good news for many viewers--you don’t have to know anything about wine to enjoy it.

An attractive cast convincingly gives life to an assortment of gently idiosyncratic folk, whose crisscrossing relationships organize the film’s central conflicts along cultural, generational, racial, and romantic lines. Setting events in motion is Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman), a stuffy British wine seller living in Paris, where his shop has failed to catch on, despite his devotion to the French’s own belief in their superior wines. At the urging of a friend, Spurrier organizes a blind tasting competition between French and American vintages, then journeys to California wine country to line up participants. The aim of the contest, however, is to promote himself rather than the American wines he’s convinced are of poor quality. As one of the Napa vintners quickly discerns, in order to ingratiate himself with his French masters, he is setting up the Americans to fail, an unthinkable humiliation in their Bicentennial year. But Spurrier is about to receive a shock… Rickman’s resume overflows with similarly arrogant, supercilious characters, but here, like the film itself, he chooses his colors from a softer palette. Severus Snape may lurk behind every curl of Rickman’s lip, but the actor imbues Spurrier with a sweetness and a strained dignity that is both unexpected and welcome, removing the edge from his snobbery and rescuing him from caricature. It’s a subtle performance, without question one of Rickman’s best in years.

Matching wits with him is Bill Pullman as Jim Barrett, owner of the heavily mortgaged (and ironically French-named) Chateau Montelena winery. Barrett has forsaken his partnership in a prestigious law firm to pursue a fading dream of tending grapes and making great wine, and this obsession has cost him his marriage and put him into constant conflict with his hippie son Bo (Chris Pine), a perpetually stoned college dropout who works--barely--for his father in lieu of making any hard decisions about his life. Pullman has never been better, offering a portrait of a wounded man clinging desperately to his dream that is finely shaded and surprisingly unsentimental. His tight-lipped speech and awkward gait as he shambles about the grounds of his failing vineyard capture the barely contained fury suffused with growing despair that gives the film its melancholy heart.

Chris Pine, on the other hand, strikes a false note or two as the Prodigal Son Bo. His performance is endearing but suggests more 80’s slacker (think Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High) than 60’s counterculture holdover. The conflict between him and his father forms the backbone of Bo’s coming-of-age story, which deftly avoids most of the clichés this type of drama is subject to through sparing use of dialogue and a running gag that has them entering a makeshift boxing ring and pummeling each other whenever one of them feels a blow-up coming on.

Fine support is added by Freddy Rodriguez as Gustavo, an Hispanic field worker in Barrett’s employ, who is secretly making his own wine and dreams of one day owning his own vineyard. Unfortunately, in the film’s major misstep, the force of Gustavo’s challenge to the racial barriers of the 1970’s is blunted by his inclusion in an unnecessary romantic triangle that has him vying with best friend Bo for the affections of Sam, Montelena’s improbably beautiful blonde intern (Rachael Taylor). Taylor’s performance is spirited, but her role is too obviously obligatory, and the film loses focus during these scenes. The important question of whether Gustavo will break into the all-white world of winemaking is supplanted by too-often-seen-before exchanges of hurt feelings and sexual jealousy, and Rodriguez figures little in the last act of the film.

Bottle Shock’s most charming turn comes from Dennis Farina, who sheds his tough-guy image and dons outrageous leisure suits to play Maurice, Spurrier’s friend, the one who originally sells him on the idea of including California wines in the contest. Overall, the film does an admirable job of evoking the 1970’s without too many crowd-indulging sight gags (hair styles, clothes), but Farina’s flashy attire provides the right kind of chuckles, perfectly capturing his character’s exuberance and innocent self-satisfaction, while allowing the audience to laugh at some of the last century’s worst fashion excesses.

Bottle Shock is not a film for the impatient. Fittingly for a movie about savoring wine, it moves at a leisurely pace, carefully exploring each aspect of the story and placing each character in its proper relation to the others and to the whole. Randall Miller’s direction is often prosaic but is sure-handed enough to bring everything together in orderly fashion for the amusing climax, which for all its inevitability is skillfully presented as a surprise. Some of the film’s best comic moments occur here, when the self-assurance of the panel of French experts begins to crack as they argue among themselves over which wines are French and which American. Yet, in keeping with Bottle Shock’s overall lack of combativeness, the French are never offered up as targets. They are merely foils, perhaps even just background. The real target is the snobbery and assumed superiority that Spurrier embodies, an attitude that is both his mechanism of defense and the chink in his armor. Watching him overcome his prejudice against the wines he wants to despise is the film’s main character arc, and perhaps its chief pleasure. Pointed dialogue and a playful Afterword declare Spurrier to be unnerved, even a bit scandalized, by America’s win, but Rickman’s sympathetic portrayal suggests otherwise, perhaps even hinting at some conspiratorial satisfaction at seeing the French who have spurned him finally brought down.

Many will want to compare this film to Sideways, the 2004 comedy about another journey through California’s wine country, but clearly its closest cousins are sports films, those in which the underdog team triumphs over the heavy favorite in the final Big Contest (I couldn’t help thinking of Hoosiers or 2004’s Miracle, which dramatizes the U.S. hockey team’s upset of the Soviet Union in the 1980 Olympics). Miller and company have steered their film away from the hyperbole and runaway emotionalism of those movies in favor of personal triumphs and the healing of bruised relationships, and it is a good decision, especially because it allows the film room to balance its two views of the insular world of wine connoisseurship, smoothly shifting back and forth between respect and genuine affection, especially for the winemakers, and a wry, lightly tongue-in-cheek take on the business of criticism and contests. The result is a fine, highly entertaining film that takes itself and its understanding of the human condition not too seriously but just seriously enough--well balanced, not too coy, a hint of sarcasm perhaps, but with a mellow, thoughtful aftertaste.