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A Walk in the Clouds Customer Reviews (16 - 18 of 32 Reviews)

Grapes after Chocolate: A Cinematic Aphrodesiac?
Okay, it's acknowledged (more forcefully in some circles than in others) that Keanu Reeves is not the best actor in the world. I can live with the fact that he's no John Barrymore or Orson Welles. I'm not into romantic movies, neither, so I was going a little against grain by buying this movie. I like the work of Arau for his sheer sense of sensuality. I wasn't disappointed in that respect.

I adore Anthony Quinn, so I especially enjoyed his performance. My favorite character by far was Don Pedro whom I've nicknamed "Canny Old Guy" (COG). It was COG who got Paul to stay by eating all his chocolates; it was COG who got Paul intoxicated enough to try to sing to his "wife"; it was COG with the advice and anecdotes about family life and obligations.

In summation, I liked A Walk in the Clouds. I wouldn't call it a cinematic masterpiece, but it's okay for you romantic types to curl up with on a cold night. Enjoy it with some red wine...or hot chocolate.

Seriously awful sentimental blather
I saw this originally in the theatre, but caught it again on late night TV recently. What a disappointment coming from the director, Alphonso Arau, of the sublime classic "Like Water for Chocolate"! "A Walk in the Clouds" is cut from another bolt of cloth completely -- the treacly, sentimental "women's movie" of the 50s -- and utterly lacking charm, intelligence, realistic emotion or even plot coherence. Be warned that this is NOT the delightful magic realism of "Water for Chocolate".

There are so many lame, unbelievable details that its almost cruel to mention all of them. Paul (the flat, affectless Keanu Reeves, incapable of expressing anything remotely like romantic love) is a chocolate candy salesman who carries around ONE box of sample candy...in the heat of late summer. Apparently he is unconcerned about it melting in the heat or even about replacing the samples he offers to potential customers. Instead of selling the candy door to door in his native San Francisco, he somehow boards a train for Sacramento (even hotter!) but ends up in ... the Napa Valley. (Please consult a map to see why this is utterly ridiculous.) BTW: Look for Debra Messing (Will and Grace) in a small, thankless role as Paul's unfaithful wife.

Victoria (Aitana Gijan) is a Mexican American graduate student who has gotten pregnant by her married college professor, and is inexplicably returning home to Napa, where she will face the anger and scorn of her traditional Mexican family. Anyone who could have written this knows exactly nothing about the period (just after the end of WWII) and is in a kind of denial about the real lifestyles of Mexican American women at that time. I'll bet that there were precious few Mexican Americans (men or women) attending graduate school at Berkley at that time, and if there was, it would remarkable and worth commenting on. Even a basic 4 year college degree was a big deal in the 40s, let alone a master's. (Ms. Gujan, who is very lovely, nonethess is a little too old to be playing a college student.) Additionally, it is more likely that an unwed pregnant girl of that time, with disaproving parents, would have gone to a home for Unwed Mothers and given her child up for adoption. There simply was not the casual acceptance of illegitimate children at that time -- it was a genuine scandal -- and that's easy to forget today when the very word "illegitimate" has practically disappeared from the language.

Paul and Victoria decide to pretend to a sham marriage to fool her parents -- for one night! -- and then he'll abandon her, leaving her and the baby to the sympathy of her family. This definitely sounds like a plan that is NOT going to work right from the get-go, as everyone is (no surprise) highly suspicious of the situation. The two have prepared so little that they couldn't fool a bored INS investigator about their "relationship", as they clearly know nothing about one another.

Although the story appears to start in summer and warm weather (the characters are wearing summer clothing), six hours after arriving at the family winery, the weather turns cold enough to actually cause the wine grapes to FREEZE. In other words, the temperature dropped from the 70s to below freezing...in September. This isn't really normal for the Napa Valley, which is the chief wine growing region of California precisely because it is so temperate. (BTW: the Aragon family lives in a kind of high-style palazzo that looks more like the ostentacious home of a 90s-era film producer than a real working vineyard.) It is a sad comment on this whole film that the views of the vineyard are misty CGI paintings, rather than real photography...a strange choice when the area being referrenced is known to be one of the most beautiful and photogenic in the world!

Anyways, as the grapes are freezing, they put out gigantic smudge pots and all the characters grab giant silken "wings" and run out to the vineyards to perform rather elaborate "dances" to direct the heat to the grapes and prevent freezing. This looks and is perfectly ridiculous. I am also surprised that it works! Apparently so well that every member of the family apparently SLEEPS with such wings at the ready in case of sudden unseasonable frosts. (Victoria runs out to flap wings in her silk nightgown...a nightgown which a couple hours earlier she was too embarassed to allow Paul to glimse her in....how come she isn't shivering in this thin sleeveless garment when the presence of frost clearly indicates that the temperature is below freezing?)

The movie is literally one gaff filled moment after another, like those I have mentioned above. The next morning -- after the freeze, which has miraculously lifted and the temperature gone back to the 70s -- it's harvest time! The next day! and a couple of days later...you got it. The entire vineyard burns to the ground...except one tiny blackened root which is, YUP, it's the foundation root brought all the way from Spain hundreds of years ago. Apparently they are going to restart an entire several hundred acre vineyard with ONE ROOT.

I know that director Arau is Mexican and probably wanted to reference as much of his beloved homeland in this project as possible. Certainly there is a long history of Mexican Americans in California, so he had lots of choices. But I am fairly certain that the vast majority of vineyards in Napa were ITALIAN in the 1940s. Any of the hispanic actors cast could have convincingly played Italians and the old film this is based on was itself Italian. Making everyone Mexican is no more believable than making them Swedish or Lebanese...it's an affectation and utterly unrealistic.

The whole movie has the feeling of a stale, artificial tasting bon bon (not unlike the candies that Paul is half-heartedly trying to sell) -- old, dried out, tasteless, synthetic and generally unpleasant. There is a place for old fashioned romance in movies, but "A Walk in the Clouds" sure is not it.

Keanu Reeves Is Horrible, But The Movie Is Terrific
Oh, what an enchanting movie this is! I saw the movie in the theater on the day it opened, and have seen it on DVD and on television at least a dozen times since then, and I still feel the charm that oozes from it.

The movie takes place in the 1940s, and is about a soldier (Keanu Reeves) named Paul Sutton who has just come home from fighting in World War II. He's coming home to the wife (Debra Messing) who he met, courted, and married just days before shipping off to war. He gets a job as a traveling chocolate salesman and ends up meeting a graduate student named Victoria Aragon (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) on a train to the Napa Valley. One mishap leads to another, and the next thing you know, Victoria tells Paul all about how she had a romantic relationship with one of her professors who impregnated her and then left her, and how her father is going to kill her when he learns of this news. Paul offers to come home with Victoria to her family's vineyard and pretend he's her husband. Upon meeting Paul, Victoria's father (Giancarlo Giannini) is furious, and Paul spends the rest of the movie actually falling in love with Victoria and trying to convince her father to accept their pseudo-marriage.

I wish I could summarize this movie into one paragraph, but there's so much beauty in it that I find it hard to compress it all into a few words. The cinematography is the strongest aspect of this movie. You'll be transported into a beautiful Eden-esque valley that seems too good to be true.

The only reason I didn't give the movie 5 stars is because Keanu Reeves is an absolutely HORRIBLE actor. There are times in this movie where he's attempting to deliver dramatic lines, and I can't help but to laugh at how much of a fool he makes of himself. He's a very handsome man, but he's absolutely wrong for this part. Giancarlo Giannini delivers a powerful performance, but the real show stealer is Anthony Quinn in his role as Victoria's grandfather and the patriarch of the family. He's benevolently charming and funny, and his performance is magical.

Notwithstanding Keanu Reeves' horrible performance, this is a beautiful movie and I highly recommend it.

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