Glenrothan

When "Donal" (Alan Cumming) discovers from his daughter that his long estranged brother isn't keeping so well, he heads back from the States where he had a successful club (until it caught fire) to the Scottish family brewery he abandoned some forty years earlier. His daughter "Amy" (Alexandra Shipp) and his granddaughter "Sasha" (Alexandra Wilkie) have long maintained a relationship with "Sandy" (Brian Cox) but for "Donal" this is going to be quite a traumatic reconciliation, and once he arrives at their beautiful Highland home he realises that he has some fence mending to do. His arrival also reintroduces him to his childhood friend "Jess" (Shirley Henderson), now a master blender, with whom he obviously had a closer relationship in days gone by but whom he also left in the lurch decades earlier. Now, with this picturesque and torrid scene set, what plays out is really predicable. Sure, there is some gorgeous photography of the pristine highlands, but the substance of the plot offers us little more than a typical dysfunctional family melodrama peppered with nowhere near enough of the sharp wit the Scots are renowned for. Cumming spends much of the film relying on his prop cigarette to make himself look thoughtful; Cox really doesn't feature so much at all - probably because he was on the other side of the lens, and with the "Queen in her treasury fiddling Scotland's money" it seems more intent on painting an unrealistic picture of an (independant?) idyllic twenty-first century nation packed full of the twee with the waters of the loch lapping gently against the shore. All it lacked was Gene Kelly bursting into "The Heather on the Hill" and I'm sorry, but as a Scot, I simply felt this wasn't up to much.