Best Keanu: “Why can’t you just love her. She’s so easy to love.”

I feel like I remember this line, “She’s so easy to love,” but I have no memory of this film. Maybe I saw this, 26 or 27 years ago, and fell asleep. Not to say that this film doesn’t have its merits — it does, and they are ample — but I doubt it would have appealed to my 21-year-old self any more than it appeals to my 47-year-old self.

It’s a lovely looking film. It’s nice to watch a piece focused on a family with its own internal sensibilities. When you watch A Walk in the Clouds, you sense how this family is not merely a collection of individuals but functions as a unit, with deeply engrained expectations and views on the world.

The mother, turning down the bed for the (fake) newlyweds, says they cannot possibly take the small bed — they need “room to maneuver.” There’s a joy in this mother’s delight in her daughter’s surprise (fake) marriage, and it’s easy to get caught up in her love of love.

Debra Messing is in this too. My first thought seeing her, in her underthings, when Keanu’s character, Paul, arrived home from war, was “she is way more naked than she needs to be.” I wrote it off, as I have found myself doing more and more as I’m revisiting more and more films from — well earlier than, say five years ago — as just how women were treated in film. Turns out Messing had a pretty miserable experience filming A Walk in the Clouds. I’ll just note here — I have spent most of my adult life thinking Debra Messing is one of the most gorgeous women on the planet. Which is irrelevant, and unnecessary, but I think I’ll just throw that in there.

I’ll also just say, as I said with this film and probably a few others, when women are home they don’t automatically run around in their underwear. It happens sometimes, but that’s not the default. There’s no reason to believe that just because Paul comes home from war in the middle of the day his wife will be in a stage of undress.

In any event. There are some interesting things in this movie, like when the family dons “butterfly wings” to send heat to the trees in the vineyard to get the frost off the grapes. It’s an interesting thing to watch, but I’m not sure if that scene is original to this movie, or whether it first appeared in Four Steps in the Clouds, the 1942 Italian film upon which A Walk in the Clouds is based.

There are also some obligatory scenes of wine-making. Crushing grapes with one’s feet. Et cetera, et cetera.

The best part of this film is Keanu Reeves and Anthony Quinn, acting together. I didn’t know Anthony Quinn was in this movie, and my first reaction was, “wow, I haven’t thought about Anthony Quinn in a really long time.” Quinn plays the grandfather, the family patriarch, and has a few one-on-one scenes with Keanu, whose character Paul is pretending to be married to his granddaughter. In one scene, they get very drunk and sing Mexican music.

Over the past few decades, Keanu has gotten much better at acting drunk. His drunk-acting in A Walk in the Clouds is so-so. His drunk acting in Siberia is genius. (Of course, I hold the minority opinion that most of Siberia is genius, or compelling, so much so that I’ve decided Katya is my spirit animal and the secret name I’ll give people who I think are worthy of me: “Call me Katya. She is my spirit animal. Everything about her is my spirit animal, from her strength to her ability to have an orgasm.”)

A Walk in the Clouds has a pretty unbelievable premise. But some critics called it a “romantic fantasy,” and that’s exactly what it is. A fantasy, one that’s nice to look at, and maybe to fall asleep to if you’ve had a really long day.

May 2022