Alan Rickman Wasn’t an Asshole, Just British, And, Well, You’re Not
It’s the mark of a fine performer indeed who can lift up even the poorest material. Alan Rickman had this quality in spades. Much has been made of his defining villainous role in Die Hard, and how, through sheer will and the humanity he imbued into the cartoony mastermind of the Nakatomi Building hijacking and heist, Rickman elevated Bruce Willis’s action-star-turn to classic popcorn pulp.
But there may be no finer example of his gifts in this regard than his portrayal of Steven Spurrier, the real-life, British-born-Parisian-dwelling wine merchant who masterminded the Judgement of Paris wine tasting in 1976, in the schlock movie Bottle Shock. Movies centering on wine are already a decidedly mixed bag, but this film was the worst kind of of contrived dreck. With a screenplay that was wildly predictable way beyond the known historical facts (the action centers on Chateau Montelena in Napa Valley with Bill Pullman doing his affable best to mug through the cardboard cutout role of a yuppy winemaker posing as backwoods hick and Chris Pine basically auditioning for Captain Kirk as a father-son duo who put their wines up against the French at Spurrier’s behest). But Rickman brings delight to the proceedings, portraying Spurrier as a dirty rotten scoundrel with just a souciant of heart. In most other hands the character would have just been another cliche fermenting in a vat of them. But Rickman, always fun to watch, brings dark-hearted joy to the ensemble. And he rescues the film from the scrap heap of terrible, awful, no good movies to make it a wonderful good-bad guilty pleasure.
