When I saw the ad for Bottle Shock, I was led to believe it would be a quirky indie about a British wine snob (Alan Rickman) who travels the '70s Napa Valley in search of vino that could challenge the French. He's the main figure on the DVD cover, too. The movie starts out that way, but turns into a tale of family angst centering on a Napa vintner (Bill Pullman) who works out his inner demons by pushing around his hippie son(Chris Pine). There's also Gustavo (Freddy Rodriguez), a wine maker wanna-be who falls for the intern at the Pullman winery.
This movie tries to be so many things and track so many characters, I didn't know who it was about or what it was trying say. It starts out as Rickman's story, then it's Pullman's, then it's Pine's, and so on. I think if the writer/director (Randall Miller) would've just picked a main story and gone with it (the Rickman in Napa, fish-out-of-water story is the best candidate, I think), this could've been an outstanding movie. But because the script is all over the place, the big wine challenge at the end is sadly anticlimactic.
Rickman is good, as always, and so is a pre-Capt Kirk Chris Pine. The real star is the beautiful wine country itself, wonderfully captured by DP Richard Pagano.
For a movie that is really about the characters, Bottle Shock is distractingly cuttie. I didn't understand why some scenes, like the one when Rickman is trying to board the plane with the wine, kept cutting away. Gotta blame Miller for this, since he gives himself an editor credit. Maybe this is why the film doesn't make the hard choice of picking a storyline and going with it. Someone who hadn't written the script maybe could have molded it better.
Miller does capture what life may have been like in Napa in the '70s. There's sweetness, as well as the story's tension of plying a trade while going unnoticed by the world. Not a bad film, but it could have been so much more. Six stars for Rickman, Pine, and the Napa Valley. One more star for the few scenes with Rickman and Dennis Farina, which are exceptionally charming.
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