Walk in the Clouds

Alfonso Arau (Like Water For Chocolate)'s WWII romance A Walk in the Clouds, based on the 1942 Italian film Quattro passi fra le nuvole, explores the intertwined notions of destiny and true love amidst a sprawling vineyard. Paul Sutton (Keanu Reeves) returns home from the front to discover that the woman he married shortly before shipping out (a cameo by Debra Messing) isn't the woman he wants to spend his life with; she couldn't handle the realities of war, so she saved his heartfelt letters without reading them.

Before the war, he was a chocolate salesman, but he is dissatisfied with civilian life and suffers from PTSD. Aboard a train, he meets Victoria (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon), a beautiful woman traveling alone. She was pursuing her master's degree in literature, but became pregnant. Victoria has nowhere to go but home to her domineering father Alberto and his winery, and Paul offers to be her "husband" to make her pregnancy appear legitimate to her family. Once at the vineyard, Paul is convinced by Don Pedro (Anthony Quinn, apparently reprising his role in Zorba the Greek) to stay and help with the yearly harvest. Paul gradually becomes accepted by Victoria's very traditional Mexican family, and pitches in to help with the backbreaking labor involved in maintaining the vineyard.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is the waste of what could have been: the romance is strictly by-the-numbers, and Keanu's painfully wooden delivery (he redefines the word "monotone") does little to soften already formulaic dialogue. Painful drunken serenades featuring Reeves and Quinn, an absurdly shot "flap like a butterfly" sequence, and hokey harvest montages featuring a choir chanting "crush the grapes" do little to cleanse the palette. However, the gorgeous twilight shots of Napa Valley (filmed on location at various wineries including Beringer, Duckhorn, Haywood, Mount Vedeer, and Mayacamus) are pure sun-drenched bliss. It's a shame that the script doesn't hold up as well. As with many modern remakes of foreign films such as the recent No Reservations based on Mostly Martha, the producers would have done well to study the source material more closely; the charm and wit that made these films classics in their original languages are lost in translation trying to produce a product geared towards American audiences. If you enjoyed Like Water for Chocolate, then you will likely find some redeeming qualities in A Walk in the Clouds, but for everyone else, I'd recommend a different vintage.