By Eric Larson

Paul Cezanne once wrote of his native Provence, "The motifs are beautiful and I spend my days better here than elsewhere." There is little doubt that director Ridley Scott feels similarly. So there's no wondering why he would urge his friend and fellow Provencal adoptee, holiday-novelist Peter Mayles, to write A Good Year, which Scott could then make into a film.

Of the result, one might say that the motifs are predictable and the two hours would be better spent elsewhere.

Russell Crowe exchanges the gladiatorial armor of Maximus for the pinstriped suit of Max Skinner, a sleazy London-based stock trader whose heart has been hardened by a life lived only for pounds and pence. When Max gets a letter announcing that he's inherited his Uncle Henry's (Albert Finney) Provençal winery — where he whiled away his childhood summers reading Death in Venice poolside — he can hardly be bothered to visit the place and assess its value so that his equally slimy real estate friend, Charlie (Tom Hollander), can put it on the market. But off he goes to the south of France eventually, for no better reason than to duck the questions being raised about his work ethics back in the city.

After he meets a saucy local (Marion Cotillard) whose attitude and arse attract him forthwith, Max begins to fantasize about a new life, a better life, sans bastardly bosses and cutthroat colleagues.

Predictability in romantic comedies is itself predictable, so it's pointless to spend time bemoaning it, though even the subplots of A Good Year — the arrival of a long-lost relative (Abbie Cornish), the mystery surrounding Uncle Henry and his undrinkable wine — cannot convince us that we're watching something we haven't sat through 1,000 times before.

A film like this should, at least, serve as fantasy fare. It's obviously intended to help those of us less fortunate to slog through another dreary, polluted winter in the hopes that we, too, might have occasion to lounge about cafés and grow a fetching five o'clock shadow next time we scrounge enough spare change together to afford a sunlit Mediterranean holiday. On that basis — which is to say, as an epic View-Master tour of Provence — much might have been forgiven.

Unfortunately, Scott and cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd (Serendipity) have missed this opportunity entirely by focusing too much on the slack plot line, as well as Crowe's lumbering attempts at a slapstick act. There's simply not enough of the classic Provence motifs a la Cezanne: the vineyards, trees, houses, hills and that azure light that softens all it touches. For that, we would be willing voyeurs.