What do you get when you ferment a pompous British ex-pat oenophile, some sun-drenched, entrepreneurial Californian hicks, distilled with a healthy dose of American chauvinism and oaked in a crew of hustlin’, washed-up hippies? I don’t know either, but it’s certainly not a fine vintage.
The film Bottle Shock stumbles and slurs its way through the tale of the 1976 “Judgment of Paris” when French wines were pitted cork-to-cork against their newly-established Californian sisters in a blind taste test. Much to the shocked outrage of the well-established French degustateurs judging the competition, the Californian wines took the prizes in all categories.
Amidst what could be a playful backdrop, the film showcases a cast decidedly lacking in char. Steven Spurrier (Alan Rickman) is an Englishman running a failing wine academy in Paris. Snubbed by his French peers in the industry, Spurrier decides to curry favour with the connoisseurs by hosting a blind sip-a-thon between French and American wines. Spurrier assumes the French will win hands-down and as such, stroke their ego enough to win a place in the upper echelons of their merlot-centric society.
So off to California he goes, to cull the best that Napa Valley has to offer. A fish out of water, and expecting to find nothing but a bunch of colonial homesteaders drinking grape juice in tetrapaks, Rickman plays up the trite but semi-comedic cultural divide between the Brits and the Yanks, enlightening the Americans that he’s not really an asshole, he’s just British.
It’s in Napa where the quixotic tale takes root and where the film preys on the British-American clash for humour. Spurrier meets Jim and Bo Barrett (Bill Pullman and Chris Pine), the father-son team barely breaking even running Chateau Montalena winery. Bo, the seven-years-late-for-Woodstock, good-for-nothing busies himself smoking up and chasing tail while his friend Gustavo (Freddy Rodriguez), the orphaned son of a Mexican field worker, who secretly ferments his own wine in a field-side shack, trying to make the big time. As Spurrier conducts a cross-regional wine tour to find the best of the west, we witness first-hand the carefully balanced all-American terroir of the Californian vintners’ community. Bo and Gustavo frequently hustle their local drinking establishment staging “blind taste tests” while Jim and Bo sort out their generational differences in their home-made boxing ring. The community lives up the “if one wins, we all win” pioneer mentality except for pig-headed Jim, who spurns Spurrier, kicks Bo out of the house and revels in his old-school establishment ways until Bo shows him the collaborative way of the future, man.
In this story of high, high hopes, life gets complicated for Bo and Gustavo when Sam (Rachael Taylor)—the blond intern with a few throw-away Hemingway quotes and a zest for cork-screwing—shows up at Chateau Montalena ready and eager to drink in everything there is to know about wine.
But rather than opening the film up, Sam—and women in general—is portrayed in a negative light. The supposed leading lady, Sam ditzes her way to Chateau Montalena in a beat-up Volkswagon with three-wheels. While you’ve got to admire her initiative and resiliency for attempting to make it in the man’s world of viticulture, she is depicted, like the grapes she cultivates, as just another product for male consumption.
Notably, there’s one wildly gratuitous scene where the male field workers chow down on burgers while ogling Sam as she cleans the thresher. She is, of course, sporting short shorts, wet with hose water and projecting—ever so subtley—sexual anticipation. I believe this was a subliminal advertisement for Bottle Shock’s pornography spin-off, Bottle Shocker where this scene is explored in further detail. Sam further puts her body up for sale in exchange for a taste of Gustavo’s wine, and later trades a cop one long gaze at her rack in exchange for access to a telephone. This is pure 70s-style carry-on camp, only carried over to this century. Granted, this swap was a well-intentioned attempt to salvage the fate of Chateau Montalena. Yet even our heroine isn’t comfortable with this decision. She later denies her boob-baring behaviour, insisting instead that the 5-0 was staring at her scar from open-heart surgery. There are a few terms for this ridiculous argument of hers, I prefer “lazy script-writing.”
Suffice to say, like a bottle of prohibition hooch, the boys pass Sam around until they and the audience have had more than their fill.
This being a 1970s historical flick, we couldn’t possibly escape the theatre without a didactic and self-indulgent discussion of civil rights. Bottle Shock only pays lip service to this major cultural movement and does so incoherently at best.
As the film attempts to depict the aftermath of the movement, another enlightening moment ensues: Gustavo gets into a dust-up with a hefty trucker who insults his Mexican ancestry. Later, however, Gustavo promotes an essentialist view of race claiming that because he had grown up as the son of Mexican field workers, great winemaking is literally in his blood. This view flies in the face of the American work-ethic promoted in the film and perhaps as a result of this conflict, Gustavo loses his job, his girl and the wine competition. Eventually, he gets his menial labour job back, but plot-wise, he drowns in his own juice.
Bottle Shock made me want to hit the bottle—hard. It’s about 45 minutes too long with too many voice-overs by Alan Rickman on vino-zen with over-romanticized visuals of rolling, rural California. The character development is hackneyed and fragmented, each role a stale cliché. The plot, while promising, includes irrelevant twists such as samurai swords, ex-wives and country clubs shoved in to fill time between Sam’s nipple-through-shirt shots. Should you see it? Sure, if you’re into banality, but otherwise I would cry chardon-NAY!
All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s)-in-Chief and/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be contacted, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to journal_editors@ams.queensu.ca.
