Review: 'Widow Clicquot' is a beautifully rendered, but narratively skimpy, telling of how a woman alone created one of the world's great champagne labels

The historical drama “Widow Clicquot” demonstrates that there are few pursuits more laborious than making the perfect champagne — except, perhaps, making a historical drama about the making of the perfect champagne.

English director Thomas Napper starts with a romance, but at the end, with the death in 1805 of winemaker François Clicquot (Tom Sturridge), leaving behind his young widow, Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot (played by Haley Bennett). François, his widow tells people regularly, was a visionary experimenting in growing grapes and transforming them into champagne — the real stuff, as we are in the Champagne region of France. Barbe-Nicole tearfully pleads with François’ father, Philippe (Ben Miles), to let her try to run the vineyards and fulfill her husband’s dream, rather than sell the land to their neighbor, the Moët family.

Napper and the script, by Erin Dignam (who wrote the Robin Wright drama “Land”), runs on two parallel tracks. One shows us Barbe-Nicole persevering through bad weather, a mountain of debts and a group of vineyard managers who doubt her abilities to lead. The other flashes back to Barbe-Nicole and François’ passionate love, their time with their daughter Clementine (Cecily Cleave), and François’ slow decline before his death.

After François’ death, the one person in Barbe-Nicole’s corner is Louis Bohne (Sam Riley), the vineyard’s sales agent, tasked with trying to sell an uncompleted product to foreign buyers in the middle of Napoleon’s military misadventures. The partnership — the movie suggests something more — culminates with Bohne smuggling Barbe-Nicole’s creation, an 1811 vintage of Veuve Clicquot (“veuve” means “widow” in French) known as “the year of the comet,” to St. Petersburg, Russia.

Napper captures the excessive beauty of the French countryside and stars Bennett and Sturridge, even as he loses the narrative thread holding the story together. One suspects Barbe-Nicole’s motivations for making what became a groundbreaking champagne went well beyond trying to finish what her husband started — and it’s a shame that Bennett (“Cyrano,” “The Girl on the Train”) isn’t given more to work with.

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‘Widow Clicquot’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 19, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated R for some sexuality and nudity. Running time: 90 minutes.