Review: Amy Poehler’s Wine Country Tries to Skirt by on Too Little

The film’s relatively static approach to narrative works in scenes where the material is funny or elevated by a certain performance.

Wine Country
Photo: Netflix

Amy Poehler’s feature directorial debut, Wine Country, has goodwill to burn. The film, about a reunion weekend shared by six longtime friends, actually stages a reunion of beloved female performers from one of SNL’s strongest periods: Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Rachel Dratch, Ana Gasteyer, Paula Pell, and Tina Fey. Written by Liz Cackowsky and Emily Spivey, Wine Country appears to presume—and probably correctly—that no elaborate plot is necessary to motivate the collective hijinks of its legendary cast. But it tries to skirt by on too little, as its barebones story and reliance on stoking nostalgia fail to deliver the emotional payoff it ultimately wants—or to provide much beyond moments of fleeting humor.

Poehler plays Abby, a character who is, in her neurotic perfectionism and attachment to binders and schedules, perhaps a shade too reminiscent of Poehler’s Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation. The film opens with Abby convincing five longtime friends—Naomi (Rudolph), Val (Pell), Catherine (Gasteyer), Jenny (Spivey), and Rebecca (Dratch)—to converge for the weekend at a rented house in Napa Valley to celebrate Rebecca’s impending 50th birthday. Although they pride themselves on being a tight-knit group, each woman except Jenny is harboring some unspoken anxiety, resentment, or news of a major life transition from the others, all of which, in traditional vacation-comedy fashion, will eventually be brought out into the open by way of verbal confrontation, momentary distress, and tearful reconciliation.

In brief: Rebecca is in denial about her age, Catherine is overworked, Naomi is anxious about her health, Abby’s fastidiousness masks a profound unhappiness, and Val is lonely. As one might expect from a comedy about friends vacationing amid the serene vistas of central California, there’s a leisurely quality to Wine Country’s plotting. Rather than being driven by the development of the characters’ arcs, the film’s scenes are often backdrops for the cast to exchange one-liners, to flamboyantly act out, or to encounter eccentric weirdos like Abby and company’s Airbnb host, Tammy (Fey), or the cook, Devon (Jason Schwartzman), who they discover “comes with the house.” Val’s flirtation with Jade, a local waitress played by Pen15 creator and star Maya Erskine, ends up motivating a couple of major scenes, but the film is only loosely committed to this subplot of casual, ambivalent attraction.

Advertisement

The film’s relatively static approach to narrative works in scenes where the material is funny or elevated by a certain performance. Throughout, Rudolph’s expressive, malleable face and infallible line deliveries reveal comic dimensions in otherwise dry scenes. Poehler wisely allows her usually excessively composed character a pair of supremely comic facial reactions. And as a guest star who gets to pop up every once a while and make a throwaway allusion to her artisanal edible soaps, Fey steals some of the film’s best comic moments.

But Wine Country’s general aimlessness also works to its disadvantage, both when the humor of a scene doesn’t click and when the film eventually tries to transform the women’s simmering conflict into a moral lesson. Not unlike a misbegotten SNL sketch, Wine Country turns to music when unsure how to spice up a flat scene, as no less than four of them see the women listening, dancing, or singing along to classic ’90s songs. And this onslaught of feel-good nostalgia is complemented by a confused scene set at an art gallery, where the crochety, aging Gen-Xers lecture Jade and her millennial friends, in the process ruining a perfectly good joke about an Andy Warhol-style exhibition of Fran Drescher portraits.

In the end, Wine Country spends all of the cultural capital earned with its casting, and then some, relying far too often on its stars to make its sketchy material entertaining. The filmmakers’ surely intentional choice to construct a plot that doesn’t over-emphasize conflict between women sometimes comes off as lazy writing (it’s a film that features not one but two puns about pinot grigio). One effect is that, during the third act when the friends are all miserable about the vacation, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why everyone is feeling quite so sour with one another. Wine Country is so focused on avoiding the impression that it’s another film about women who can’t get along that when it concludes with a moral about facing and accepting change in yourself and others, it feels both ham-handed and unearned.

Advertisement
Score: 
 Cast: Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Ana Gasteyer, Paula Pell, Jason Schwartzmann, Emily Spivey, Tina Fey, Maya Erskine, Cherry Jones  Director: Amy Poehler  Screenwriter: Liz Cackowsky, Emily Spivey  Distributor: Netflix  Running Time: 103 min  Rating: R  Year: 2019

Pat Brown

Pat Brown teaches Film Studies and American Studies in Germany. His writing on film and media has appeared in various scholarly journals and critical anthologies.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.