Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
No
Accounting for Taste
(Bottle Shock, 9/15/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Having
just moved away after more than twenty years in Ithaca, your humble
critic expected a little readjustment. There's that period, so natural-seeming
as to be imperceptible, where that new home feels defined only in terms
of where it isn't. When the new place is that other wine and
milk-producing country, the one north of San Francisco, the illusion
is particularly unfair. Sonoma deserves better than to be thought of
as Not Ithaca.
So it's fortunate for me that Randall
Miller's oenophile comedy Bottle Shock has come along just now.
Shot among northern California's straw and olive-colored slopes, the
movie is about that special moment in history (the summer of 1976, to
be exact) when California's wines first beat le produits de France
for top honors at a major competition. What it promises to be is a delicious
blend of cross-cultural misunderstanding and non-obnoxious connoisseurship,
a la Sideways. As a celluloid brochure for the place, with a
beauty as casual as a perfectly worn-in leather jacket, Bottle Shock
is just what the sommelier recommended. Is it clear enough that this
writer was primed to like this movie?
Shock offers up its iconic
clash, hippies vs. snobs, with a certain affection that belies the fact
that both are, in the end, just silly stereotypes. (Once upon a time,
there were plenty of French hippies…and some even liked wine, too).
In one corner is Chris Pine (who will soon play a young Captain Kirk
in J.J. Abrams' upcoming Star Trek origins movie) and Rachael
Taylor as the laid-back Americans with down-to-there hair; in the other
is Alan Rickman as a Francophilic Brit who just can't conceive that
decent wine is made anywhere west of Bordeaux. Rickman comes to Napa
looking for American candidates to compete in a blind taste-test against
the best of France. What he finds, along with bad 70's-era automobiles
and extra crispy fried chicken, is the better-than-expected vino we
already knew he would.
Given that the result of the competition
is telegraphed by the premise, the appeal of Bottle Shock had
to be rooted in clever plotting and characters—the how and
who instead of the what. Sideways pulled this off
nicely, making what most people regard as a marginally useful, maximally
pretentious avocation into the stuff of universal themes. Audiences
took their appreciation of that movie to the liquor stores: after it
appeared, U.S. sales of pinot noir soared and merlot fell. (If you saw
the movie you know why.)
Bottle Shock is just not
bottled from the same vintage. Where Sideways convinced people
that it was entertaining and educating them at the same time, Shock
shoehorns a highbrow subject into a comedy that is decidedly, even aggressively
middlebrow. In addition to a few wine-red herrings (such as a subplot
with Freddy Rodriguez that goes nowhere), there's not enough subtext
to sustain it beyond a rather crude attempt to drum up Rocky-like
rooting interest. And really, how many people are really going to stand
up and cheer for a competition that involves a bunch of sour-pussed
judges sipping and spitting in silver buckets?
For those with a special interest
in the subject, the film still may be worth a try. Given that a bottle
of the prize-winning California wine featured here is now in the Smithsonian,
one might argue that this is less a movie than a historical reenactment,
which of course demands a different standard. The rest of us will just
have to make do with the pretty landscapes.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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