Bottle Shock film review: cheesy overwritten screenplay corks the Bottle

Wine lovers the world over savoured the smooth ambrosial textures of Sideways (2004), many a palette pleased by Alexander Payne’s low-key direction and the quaint story of two buddies embarking on a weeklong tour of California’s wine country. Winos no doubt hoped Sideways would pop the cork of a new genre of stories from the vine, and in that film’s fermenting footsteps comes Bottle Shock – Hollywood’s account of how wine from the Napa Valley landed worldwide cred when it won a blind tasting test in Paris in 1976.

Directed by Randall Miller, the film has one of those aren’t-we-clever double meaning titles which refers to the shocking theory that Americans are capable of making superior wine to the French and to a term describing wine’s equivalent of jet-lag, where the quality of the drink can be influenced by travel conditions. Bottle Shock is loosely based on a true story, but a cheesy and exhaustingly over-written screenplay relegates realism to the backseat and narrative convenience to the front so plausibility is never on the cards.

Opening with sweeping aerial shots of acres upon acres of luscious vineyards, Miller’s tone is dreamy and sanctimonious, underlining the assumed importance of the story about to unfold. Voiceover from Bill Pullman begins “before Paris, nobody drank our wine…” and the plot whisks away to France, beginning in the small wine shop of highbrow aficionado Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman). The shop is grandly named ‘The Academy of Wine’ but we meet only one customer, Maurice (Dennis Farina), who drinks but never pays and encourages Spurrier to broaden his business. Spurrier, whose character is based on an actual person, decides to travel to California to bring back the region’s best drops for a competition he will host.

Enter Jim Barrett (another actual person, played by Bill Pullman), a headstrong winemaking perfectionist whose vineyard Chateau Montelena is on the brink of going bust. Jim is intent on bottling the perfect Chardonnay despite little help from his layabout shaggy-haired hippy son Bo (Chris Pine). Bo’s friend and Jim’s assistant Gustavo (actual person number three, played by Freddy Rodeiguez) is secretly cultivating his own batch of elixir-of-the-gods wine. Even by wine industry standards his attitude is pretentious: “you have to have it (winemaking) in your blood,” he yelps histrionically, practically frothing Merlot from the mouth. “You have to grow up with the soil underneath your nails, the smell of the grapes in the air that you breathe… The refinement of the vine is a religion that requires pain and desire and sacrifice.” Yes, sometimes the characters in this movie actually talk like that.

The writers (a bunch of them are credited including Randall Miller) latch onto an interesting subject and there are whiffs of a great story buried beneath the Bottle Shock’s more-is-better screenplay. Structurally it struggles to decide whose story to tell: is it about the French importer who opened the world’s eyes to international winemaking? Is it the story of the struggling Jim Barrett and his ailing Chateau Montelena? Is it the story of Gustavo, the surreptitious winemaker who succeeded against the odds? Or is it a triangular love story between Bo, Gustavo and the sexy new winemaking apprentice Sam (Rachel Taylor)? Miller attempts all those stories and more, placing the most emphasis on the three young characters even though they have the least relevance to the central story.

Over-abundance characterizes to many of Miller’s choices: instead of focusing on one of the two winemakers or the wine importer, he focuses on all three. Instead of staging important father and son dialogue in a simple domestic setting, they talk about important subjects in a boxing ring in between punching each other in the noggin, thus heightening the friction between them (at least theoretically). Instead of having the girl puzzle about which man to choose, she chooses both. Instead of using either voiceover monologues or text captioning, again, Miller opts for both (the voiceover at the start of the film, which never returns, is lifted directly from back-then-things-were-different narration 101). Instead of…well, you get the point.

Fortunately, there is some fun to be had: Bill Pullman, a good actor who often finds himself battling shonky screenwriting, gets to open a bottle of white by slicing it with a samurai sword and his character, though thinly developed and frustratingly contrived, is more than shade endearing. Alan Rickman has mastered cinematic snootiness and is well beyond being typecast as the haughty hoity-toity type; he has in fact made a career of out of it – memorably in the Harry Potter movies, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) and Die Hard (1988). If the rest of the cast (bar Pullman) are cask wine, Rickman is a bottle of Romanée Conti and he knows it. You get the sense, however, that his character would think very little of Bottle Shock, which should have been the perfect accompaniment for a nice drop of red but is more beer and peanuts than Pinot and Chevre. Unlike wine appreciation, which is surrounded by po-faced pomposity, you just can’t take it seriously.

Bottle Shock’s Australian theatrical release date: 26 March 2009.