In returning to the ordinary world after years of creating fantasy--in Alien, Blade Runner or Gladiator, or in the surreal realm of war in Black Hawk Down--Ridley Scott just made his most completely unbelievable film. And his worst. In A Good Year, Russell Crowe plays Max Skinner, a truculent alpha-male stockbroker from London who inherits a shabby chateau and vineyard in Provence. "He needs to learn an important life lesson," Scott says in the production notes. Since Max is the kind of boss who refers to his employees as "lab rats" and refers to himself as "your boss and your genetic superior," what he really needs is a death lesson. The faceless troops in his office give him standing ovations, wowed by Max's unattributed quoting of Vince Lombardi's motto "Winning isn't everything--it's the only thing."

Scott packs in endless buildingscapes of 30 St. Mary Axe--euphemistically called "The Gherkin Building," that ugly glass dildo that British filmmakers won't stop slavering over. The big weenie has its thematic purpose: visually speaking, it supports the phallic thrust of Crowe's penetration into the flanks of France. In rural France, Max finds a variety of colorful stock types. First comes a gesticulating but sloppy vine tender who mutters "Soon my body and spirit will be defeated by this terroir." Then Max romances a willowy waitress called Fanny (Marion Cotillard). In Scott's idea of a meet-cute, she and her bicycle are run off the road by Max's car.

A younger bit of blonde crumpet turns up, too: Uncle Henry's illegitimate child Christie (Abbie Cornish). It pains me to declare that an actress has been cast for her ass, but Scott makes sure we get Cornish's in our face. Although she is supposed to be a "wine brat" from Napa, Christie has no better response to a Frenchman's accusation that California wine is "Hawaiian Punch" than "tell that to Robert Mondavi." That's like defending a rhetorical attack on American cuisine with a spirited tribute to McDonald's. The misguided snobbery is so rank that it pollutes one of those fantasies everyone has of retiring to the vines somewhere in the south of France. Scott crowds the local village with milling figures; it looks like an outdoor waiting room. He savages vulgarian tourists who can't pronounce "salade niÁoise." But his dreams of the wine-soaked life aren't any more elegant.

Since Skinner gets to keep all his marbles--what he calls his "F.U." money--the life lesson taught here is "Get rich, then get richer." A Good Year includes Crowe's nonironic reading of a line "the English, born to rule." The sourness of the fantasy could have worked; at a long distance, it's not too different from Billy Wilder's autumnal movie Avanti! (1972). But in that film, Jack Lemmon overcomes his truculence, slightly; Crowe celebrates obnoxiousness. Describing the chateau's wine, Skinner says, "It gives you a blinding headache and makes you angry." So does A Good Year.

A Good Year (PG-13; 118 min.), directed by Ridley Scott, written by Marc Klein, based on the book by Peter Mayle, photographed by Philippe Le Sourd and starring Russell Crowe and Marion Cotillard, opens Friday countywide. Metro Santa Cruz staff writer Richard von Busack also appears on Santa Cruz Community Television's 'CinemaScene.'

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