by MATTHEW HAYS

In A Good Year, Russell Crowe plays the kind of smug, selfsatisfied nasty stockbroker we’ve come to expect in movies. Like the characters populating Wall Street or Boiler Room, the man is a selfdescribed asshole, ruthless and money worshipping, seemingly proud of being soulless.

It’s achingly predictable, and sadly, from the first 10 minutes of Ridley Scott’s adaptation of the Peter Mayle novel of the same title, we can feel the template taking shape. Everything falls into place almost exactly as you would expect.

Crowe is happy as a mammon pig when he receives word from one of his obsequious underlings that his uncle has died. Cue a flashback, in which a young nephew grapples with the shadow of his overbearing, full-of-life uncle (Albert Finney). Just like in Citizen Kane, we begin to see clues as to what has made Crowe into the man he is—or isn’t.

Crowe goes to his uncle’s estate, which he has inherited, and begins to figure out how much he can sell it for. He begins to learn that there’s a joie-de-vivre, a certain Euro-thrill in life that his broomhandle- up-ass existence in not-somerry- old England has been depriving him of. As he prepares to sell the place, he learns that there’s more to life than stock options, and that living on a sprawling estate in France might just lead to true happiness.

No kidding: this is the basic premise of the film—it gets no deeper than this. A young woman shows up, saying she’s the illegitimate daughter of Crowe’s uncle, something he sees as a potential threat to his inheritance. But she’s not a threat for long, and she quickly becomes one of the most underdeveloped secondary characters in big-screen history.

I’d spoil the ending for you, but there really wouldn’t be any point. It was as if the filmmakers went out of their way to make the least surprising and imaginative closure in movie history. Put it this way: if you can’t figure out how this film about the perils of greed ends, you must be one of those people who actually believed weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.

A Good Year opens Friday, Nov. 10

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