Sideways
Dir.: Alexander Payne
R, 123 min.
Opening Friday at Green Hills
The more accurate a satirist is, the more likely he's to be accused of cruelty. Alexander Payne's specialty is the America of strip malls, public schools and chain restaurants, and his subjects are middle-class lives that hold despair at bay with delusion—a lot of people would rather look away from them than at them. When his About Schmidt came out two years ago, I remember friends arguing that Payne was thumbing his nose at Middle Americans. Their evidence included a supposedly overlong shot of a Tony Roma's, held to rib the rubes within.
But Tony Roma's is everywhere, and for me the shock was of seeing something so commonplace and recognizable on a movie screen. As Homer Simpson would say, it's funny because it's true. In Sideways, an acerbic comedy-drama from Payne and his writing partner Jim Taylor, the director ventures outside Schmidt's Omaha into the California vineyards, in the presumably rarefied company of a wine snob. And what's there? The same despair, just with different delusions—and the restaurants haven't even changed that much.
A road movie adapted by Payne and Taylor from a Rex Pickett novel, Sideways follows two friends on a bachelor's-party trip through the Santa Ynez wine country. The trip is pitched as one last bonding rite between Miles (Paul Giamatti), an oenophile and failed novelist, and groom-to-be Jack (Thomas Haden Church), his old college roommate. In truth, each needs the other as a prop. Miles, a devastated divorcé, lectures Jack on the look and taste of each vintage so he can drink. Jack, a washed-up soap star, justifies his compulsive womanizing by campaigning to get Miles laid.
Payne nicks their masculine self-pity and denial with a hundred little paper cuts: the flicker of self-loathing on Miles' face, for example, when his mother offers money he's already swiped from her. The prickly comic tone yields to something more rueful when Miles and Jack meet their dream matches: a tough-chick sommelier, Stephanie (Sandra Oh), and her server friend Maya (Virginia Madsen). Neither knows about the impending wedding. Jack, glib and amoral, can live with stringing along Stephanie. As the weekend nears, Miles can't.
At this point, Payne's sensitivity to actors, their surroundings and the emotional shadings of a scene brings new truth to familiar material. A back-porch conversation in which the bruised Maya and Miles talk wine in terms clearly referring to themselves would be insufferably coy, if Giamatti and Madsen (a former starlet who's a revelation here) didn't play the scene with such painful, guarded hope—and if Payne didn't capture so raptly the awkward hush of a late-night lull. The performances prove that if you make characters specific enough, they'll evoke real-life types on their own. In the marvelous Giamatti, Payne has an actor who can portray embarrassment without embarrassment or vanity, even when he's sprawled across a hotel bed with a bottle and Barely Legal.
Like Payne and Taylor's other films, including the scathing Election, Sideways doesn't flatter us with our supposed moral superiority. No matter who we side with, Jack or Miles, we're bound to pick someone who will let us down and, worse, will get us to acknowledge whatever kindred failings made us side with them. At its bitter core, Sideways is about people on whom pleasure and transcendence are lost. What better litmus test than wine, which can either awaken your senses or drug them into a stupor? Even the glorious wine country is photographed unflatteringly, washed-out and dulled. We feel the pang of not getting to savor its beauty.
What does look inviting, oddly enough, is the comfortably upscale restaurant where Maya works. It's bright, colorful and cozy, and seen from the outside it's a kind of beacon, comforting in its utter familiarity: an oasis of stasis, as the heroes rush to get nowhere. It's as modest as the sweet little sliver of redemption that Payne and Taylor extend to Miles, on the same recognizable human scale. Compared to their other, more overtly comic films, Sideways may seem short on surprises—except the sense of seeing people you've known, in situations you've experienced, in places you've been.
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