Uncorked - Cheap Thoughts

There’s an interesting blend of formula and concept here. Uncorked very much plays out like a typical narrative, a young man with a dream that’s outside of his comfort zone, the struggles he goes through to achieve it including going against the family business and the conflicts that ensues. All of the hardships and training to be better to achieve their goal as well as better themselves as a person. This is usually the narrative for a majority of sports films and to an extent coming of age films, and yet in this regard the film is about wine tasting.

In this sense this is the strongest way director Prentice Penny could have presented this story through a familiar structure. Wine tasting is not a practise most audiences would be familiar with, the technicalities, the jargon and culture around it is a rather niche market. Rather than having to waste time by explaining the necessary background to the audience, Penny let’s the details be explained through convention. You don’t need to know how wine tasting works, you just need to know basic film theory that you naturally accumulate over watching films. You know when the protagonist Elijah (Mamoudou Athie) is doing well and when he’s doing poorly because habit dictates when it happens.

For some this might not be enough to save the film. A conventional structure still means the film plays out in a predictable and safe manor regardless of what fancy new framing they use to coat it over with. It’s an understandable perception, it entirely depends on what the viewers sees as important. There are many out there where this will work perfectly well, that the intrigue opened up from the discussion of such a specific topic would qualify as enough of a new concept that presentation is merely an afterthought to your engagement.

It goes further than just the structure, the characters within the film all follow the basic rules, the dreamy-eyed protagonist, the supportive mother, the apprehensive father, the girlfriend who exists merely to be the girlfriend. Some of these work better than the other, his mother Sylvia (Niecy Nash) is given the most character and story outside of her son, but then characters such as his previously mentioned girlfriend Tanya (Sasha Compère) serves no purpose other than to be a character for Elijah to bounce off of. We accept it because again this is how these stories work, but then there are times where the film really likes to push its luck, such as with the best friend character Richie (Gil Ozeri) is nothing less than an asshole. He’s arrogant, obnoxious, rude and seemingly has no similarities to our main character other than their love of wine but that is not enough to make them a believable friendship, especially when he is given no positive qualities to speak of and will probably end up being the one thing everyone walking away from the film will agree as a stand out negative.

-Danny