A Good Year
The distinctly European sensibility that informs "A Good Year" keeps the lightly comic romance genial, relaxed and unhurried.
Nevertheless, the film, most of which is set near a vineyard in Provence, France, has the body and nutrition of a Lime Diet Coke.
Like a couple of thousand earlier movies, it builds to the leading character's realization that there's nothing like a little rural living to purify the soul of a hotshot city boy. But consistent with the times, I use the word purify loosely.
Russell Crowe is Max Skinner, a cocky, peerless London bonds seller ("Winning is the only thing.") whose long-neglected Uncle Henry (Albert Finney) bequeaths to him a scorpion-riddled Provence chateau and vineyard that yields wine as putrid as urine.
Intending to rehabilitate the estate just enough to sell it, Max spruces up the pool and the tennis court, and splashes paint over corroded ceilings.
This, after all, is where, as a child, the orphaned boy Max (Freddie Highmore) had spent several delightful summers with Uncle Henry learning about wine, chess and charm.
The adult Max yearns for local restaurateur Fanny (Marion Cotillard), and warms to his uncle's illegitimate American daughter Christie (Abbie Cornish).
The film's most fragrant bouquet, though, is its flashback passages involving the boy and his uncle, partly because Highmore ("Finding Neverland" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory") is such an unaffected child actor, but mostly because Finney inhabits Henry the way a rumpled hat might rest atop an old fisherman.
The film is an uncharacteristically sweet one by director Ridley Scott ("Alien," "Blade Runner," "Gladiator") who warms now and then ("Thelma & Louise") to notions of affection.
Scott directed from Marc Klein's adaptation of Peter Mayle's novel. Although the film is rigorously unsentimental -- too much so to be as successful as it might have been -- it is full of folks who are uncomplicated in their niceness.
That's true even of Crowe but especially of Finney, aging with the aplomb of the picture's beverage of choice.
- In wide release.
Additional Information:
Details
'A Good Year'Rated PG-13 for language and some sexual content; 
A 'clean' joke
In 'A Good Year,' Russell Crowe's character quotes a line about the desert from 'Lawrence of Arabia': 'It's clean. I like it because it's clean.'
Crowe's co-star, Albert Finney, was director David Lean's second choice for the title role in 'Lawrence of Arabia,' but, like first choice Marlon Brando, turned down the role that later made Peter O'Toole famous.
