Pantoliano stops this dying on the vine
From the Vine (M, 93 mins) Directed by Sean Cisterna Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★ 1⁄ 2
In English and Italian with English subtitles
Stop me if you’ve heard this one already: A wealthyish man, facing retirement age with no enthusiasm at all, resolves his existential crisis by suddenly remembering that his family still own a vineyard in Italy. He hops on a plane and ‘‘finds himself’’ among the serried rows of vibrant grapes and adorably eccentric locals.
Put like that, From the Vine sounds like any number of vanity projects and big-star junkets I’ve sat through, with Liam Neeson’s Made in Italy still unpalatably fresh in my memory.
And, on paper, From the Vine is potentially the worst of the lot, as our self-obsessed bloke-who-mustbe-redeemed doesn’t even have the good grace to be divorced or widowed, but has instead skipped out on a still functional marriage without giving his wife and adult daughter muchmore than a hint that hewas about to do so.
Nope, wife Marina simply arrives home to find that husband Marco has left town, apparently to follow the dream that he had only outlined to her the night before. And, soon enough, similarly without bothering to ask, he has hollowed out the couple’s joint retirement fund, to get ‘‘his’’ new vineyard out of hock and back in business.
It’s a fine line, between ‘‘following your dreams’’ and ‘‘acting like a total asshat’’ and I reckon Joe Pantoliano’s Marco jumps that line a number of times during From the Vine’s commendably slender running time.
Yet, expecting the usual thunderous tone-deafness and unchallenged chauvinism of the genre, I eventually kind of warmed to From the Vine, for the simple reason that the film-makers – Pantoliano especially – actually seem to be completely aware that Marco is hurting everyone around him, but especially Marina and daughter Laura, who make no secret of their anger and sense of betrayal when they show up at the vineyard a few weeks intoMarco’s self-imposed new life.
Of course, everythingwill be resolved, as true love and a few glasses of strong red triumph in the end. In fact, the challenges to Marco succeeding as awinemaker here are laughably slim, with a seemingly telegraphed sub-plot about a disastrous rainstorm on the eve of harvest apparently left on the editor’s bench.
Pantoliano’s spiky and layered performance asMarco basically saves this film from itself, with the actor cashing in a few decades worth of roles as a coward and a villain to flesh out the character into something far more interesting than the self-satisfied and smug caricature that a more obvious leading man would have located.
Wendy Crewson and Paula Brancati – both better known for television work – provide selfless support as Marina and Laura, and those rural southern Italian landscapes again effortlessly fill the screen with something to look at whenever the actual storytelling has sputtered to a halt.
From the Vine is a lessinfuriating-than-usual stab at a storyline that usually just reeks of entitlement and narcissism. Writing today, at the end of an appalling year, let’s call that awin.