From new contributor Samantha Craggs
In theory, there's a lot to love about Wine Country. It's two whole hours devoted to women in their 40s and 50s, an often invisible demographic in film. What's more it's rarely about typical topics like marriage or children. It stars watchable and funny women. It passes the Beschdel Test in spades.
But with Wine Country, sadly, the result is as bland as the biscuit and asparagus tones that permeate the backdrop...
The film, streaming now on Netflix, is Amy Poehler's maiden feature directorial effort. It follows six friends who were once servers together at a Chicago pizza place. Through love, nostalgia and force of habit, they've stayed in touch ever since. It's Rebecca's (Rachel Dratch) 50th birthday, and Abby (Poehler), that friend who can never just relax, has planned a packed itinerary for their long weekend holiday in Napa Valley. None of them care much about wine, but they like getting drunk, and they like kicking back in flannel pyjamas and dancing to Kim Wilde and Bel Biv Devoe with people who get them.
Some of the friends are successful, like Ana Gasteyer's Catherine the pizza chain owner, while another is out of a job. Sometimes they talk about each other behind their backs. Sometimes their neuroses are on display, like Abby losing it when no one's into hurrying to the group drone shot. They're all in different places in their lives, with different priorities and methods of communicating, and therein lies the movie's tepid, underwhelming friction.
It's not enough.
The backdrop is pure Napa, with organic vineyards, pretentious art shows and people wearing airy white clothing. (The moments mocking the wine industry are the funniest in the film.) The house they rent looks like it's been plucked from a local real estate magazine, so there's never really much to look at. There are tensions that percolate between the women, and a couple of minor secrets kept, but there are no big plot hills to climb in Wine Country. The conflict is too muted to resist fast forwarding, or to amount to any significant climax. It's basically a display of the various musings and variations of life that exist at 50, a round-robin look at midlife, and the dullness of the film makes 50 look older than it is.
It's not the pedigree. The actors come from the SNL orbit, and they've entertained us for years. Maya Rudolph has always been an underrated natural. Emily Spivey and Paula Pell, both SNL writers, carry their own well -- they're not groundbreaking actors, but neither is Zach Galifianakis. Jason Schwartzman is fun as Devon, who drives them around in a van, requests Sublime and comes with the house. And who doesn't love to see Poehler and Fey in anything or especially taking the stage at awards shows and slaying the audience with sharp, on-point humour? (One of my favourites from their awards show oeuvre: “Matthew McConaughey did amazing work this year,” Fey said at the Golden Globes in 2014. “For his role in Dallas Buyer's Club, he lost 45 pounds. Or what actresses call being in a movie.”)
Wine Country needs jokes that sharp. It lacks the big laughs of Bridesmaids, the acidic humour of Mean Girls, and even the usual feminist magic of Poehler and Fey. It's fantastic that there's an industry willingness to make more of these films, now, but given the opportunity, Wine Country needed to be bigger, ballsier, and edgier. Poehler and company have it in them, but it's not on display here. C