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Until about the halfway point, however, the script is too full of itself. It tries painfully hard to be poetic and profound, waxing stilted and philosophical about the nectar of the vine and sunlight and soil all that business. Director Randall Miller and his co-screenwriters seem to be thinking of Virginia Madsen's touching soliloquy on wine from "Sideways" and trying to outdo it, and then outdo it again, and again.
It doesn't work. All of the actors here are convincing, but no one matches Madsen's subtlety, so the overwritten passages sound even more speechy than they would have looked on the page.
Then Miller lets go of the pretensions and trusts the story to win us over. It does.
"Bottle Shock" tells the story of the Chateau Montelena winery, a hardscrabble startup in the Napa Valley in 1976, presided over by a feuding father and son ( Bill Pullman and Chris Pine). A European wine snob, Steven Spurrier ( Alan Rickman), wanders into the valley and tries the area's wines. He's blown away by how good they are. He takes a couple dozen bottles back to Paris with him.
What happened next is now considered a groundbreaking event in the history of wine. A bottle of the Chateau Montelena Chardonnay that Spurrier took to Paris is now in the Smithsonian.
Rickman carries the movie nicely as the man who dragged French epicureans into the modern era, and Pullman and Pine do well as the battling Barretts. Freddy Rodriguez is both pugnacious and touching as a young rival vintner.
Production design is terrific, with a special notice for whoever found the cars. Every car being driven, or just parked in the street, is either ugly, goofy-looking or old and rusty. They're all a nice silent comic relief.
But it's the story that really carries the movie. This kind of narrative would be welcome anytime, anywhere. Who doesn't love it when a nobody goes up against a rigidly controlled establishment, and wins?
BOTTLE SHOCK is a Freestyle Releasing release of a film by Randall Miller, with a script by Miller, Jody Savin, Ross Schwartz and Lannette Pabon. 110 minutes. PG-13 for language, sexuality, drug use. Opens today at Criterion Cinemas Blue Back Square in West Hartford.
Contact Susan Dunne at sdunne@courant.com
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