This review definitely contains spoilers.
After waiting what seems like forever for this movie, I was finally able to see it the other night. In the interest of full disclosure, let me start by saying that the novel by Elizabeth Knox is one of my favorite books of all time. When I heard a film was being made, I was skeptical. That this complicated, strange and beautiful book could be made into a film with any semblance of coherence, let alone quality, seemed impossible. Keeping this in mind, I watched the film with a very careful, very critical eye, and fully expected to hate it.
I didn't. But I can't say I liked it much either.
The casting is almost perfect. Jeremy Renier, Gaspard Ulliel and Vera Farmiga are dead-on as far as appearance and mannerisms, and all do a wonderful job with the parts they play. Keisha Castle-Hughes is a question mark; she's a good actress who does well in the beginning, but when her character begins to age, her gravitas vanishes, and this took me right out of a lot of scenes. It's hard not to roll your eyes when the woman playing the aging mother of several children looks at least ten years younger than her eldest daughter. But this casting error seems minor when laid next to the film's more obvious fault: the angel.
Xas is a problem because his role in both the story and Sobran's life is diminished. While it's made clear he's important to Sobran and Sobran to him (through telling, not showing, which is always annoying) the *point* of their relationship is never explored. I'm honestly not sure if Niki Caro intended for them to be seen as lovers or not, and that's an issue, not because (as one reviewer suggests) no fan of the book could be satisfied without a sex scene, but because it muddles the whole angel plot and turns a fascinating character into set dressing. It's impossible to tell whether Xas is manipulating events or if his sole purpose is to make wine and spout metaphors, in which case, why is he bothering? The consequences of his immortality and the removal of his wings are not so much as touched on in the film, and this lack of exposition makes it very hard to care about him. If you're going to have an angel in a story like this one, about humans and humanity, there needs to be a good reason, otherwise it just doesn't fit. I'm frankly baffled as to why the director would choose to remove so many fantasy elements (not to mention a murder mystery subplot) from the story. Replace thirty-minutes of artsy shots of vines and bees with some actual *plot* and this would have been a much more interesting film.
That said, the cinematography (save for some inexcusably ridiculous shots of the angel in flight) is wonderful and the score is lovely throughout. Some of the softer scenes, early conversations between Xas and Sobran, and later between Sobran and Aurora, are directly lifted from the book and entirely too beautiful, the best moments in the film - and that's kind of my whole issue. With source material that good, you don't have to make huge changes to suit your "vision" (showcasing Castle-Hughes is a blatant priority, and a straight-washing of what is, at its core, a gay love story, and that's problematic whether you choose to regard it as such or not) or ego (clearly the director wanted to tell her own tale, not Knox's, and simply used the novel as a springboard).
The Vintner's Luck's incurable flaw is its pointlessness; ironic, considering there is a scene in which Sobran laments a lifetime of love and effort resulting in nothing. That almost perfectly describes the film itself.
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