Originally published 11/2/04
Sideways
Director: Alexander Payne
Writers: Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, based on the novel by Rex Pickett
Producer: Michael London
Stars: Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh
Screenwriting gurus use a term called “petting the dog”, which is meant to remind writers to give their characters some action that humanizes them, so we in the audience will like them.
Sideways shows us a different application of this principle, we might call it “chugging the spit bucket.” Which means there’s got to be a lot to this warm, rambling charmer of a movie for us to like these characters. After all, how hard is it to like a guy who pets a dog?
Miles (Paul Giamatti) chugs the spit bucket. He wants a drink, after all, and the tasting steward at the phoney-baloney winery at which he’s stranded refuses to top off his glass. So he does what any alcoholic, self-loathing, middle-aged author would do after hearing his third novel has been, yet again, rejected.
I read somewhere recently that demographers in the advertising business are hoping to expand people’s perception of what is “young”, so those in their late 30’s/early 40’s can feel comfortable buying the same stuff as people in their 20’s. This places the mid-life crisis in a time while you’re still, technically, celebrating your shallow youth. Simultaneously, the AARP is reaching out to people in their fifties, and have dropped the designation “American Association of Retired Persons”, in order to widen their political clout. Their acronym now stands for nothing.
So in the world of Coke or Pepsi, red state or blue state, smoking or non, the forces of marketing are attempting a new polarization. You are either young and irresponsible or old and settled, with nothing in between. This tends to make the transition rather crashingly traumatic, and Sideways is about two friends facing similar life-changing issues in radically divergent ways, at an age where, in previous generations, they might easily be grandparents already.
Jack (Thomas Haden Church) is getting married in a week. Once a semi-recognizable face on a soap opera, these days he does voice-overs informing us about low, low APR’s, and describes his recent commercial resume as “mostly nationals” in that way that shows he thinks it means something to anyone outside of Los Angeles. His future father-in-law is showing him the ins-and-outs of his business, and Jack is trying to tell himself it’s simply a source of steady income in between auditions.
Miles, his college roommate and longtime friend, is taking him on a week-long tour of wine country in preparation for the wedding. For him, it’s about getting snockered in a very sophisticated way – he’s a well-informed and opinionated oenophile who truly does relish a good quaff, but he looks like any other drunk when he stumbles back to his motel room at the end of the night, or when he makes meandering, pitiful calls to his ex-wife from a restaurant pay phone while he’s supposed to be in the bathroom (“did you drink and dial?” Jack asks scoldingly.)
For Jack, this week is about sex – both for himself (he’s not married yet, after all), and for Miles, who he reasons could use cheering up. Each finds a woman to woo in their own way, Jack with the sexually-ravenous single mom Stephanie (Sandra Oh, exuding allure in a way mainstream Hollywood hasn’t allowed her to demonstrate), Miles with the cautious but intrigued waitress Maya (Virginia Madsen, all but glowing with a real three-dimensional character to play for once).
None of it goes easily, naturally. Sideways is about the way our feelings and desires are often helpless in the tide of events, and how this is all like wine – the movie makes the point that the primary reason different years at the same wineries offer subtle changes in flavor is because of the weather. Literally every unpredictable day of sun or rain, heat or cold, shapes what ends up in your glass.
Payne embraces the “life is about the messy stuff” motif – from casting very non-Hollywood faces in all the roles (what a shock to see people who look like people) to the lived-in production design of the restaurants and living rooms they occupy.
In spite of his incisiveness, brilliance as a writer, and sensitivity to actors, there’s frequently been an unpleasant vein of contempt running underneath Payne’s movies, almost as if he couldn’t help tipping the characters of About Schmidt and Election into the pitiable and ugly column in order to get more of a laugh. Here, he’s more assured, more trusting in our willingness to love our four leads, and it represents his best work as a filmmaker to date.
The cast helps enormously. As Jack, Church (most recognizable from the sitcoms Wings and Ned and Stacey) wears a look like a golden Labrador – eager and a bit dumb. After every verbose Miles rhapsody or condemnation of the current vintage; he sips, furrows his brow, and decides – “tastes pretty good to me.”. And we can see he has the power so many emotionally stunted men have to convince, really convince themselves, that their genitals are giving them hints about their heart, and that he can lie his way out of most anything if he can just prevail upon his loyal buddy to help out.
Finally, there’s never enough praise for Giamatti, who has in the past brought humanity and dimension to roles as disparate as an underground comic artist and cult misanthrope (American Splendor), a noxious and hot-tempered radio executive named Pig Vomit (Private Parts), and even an ape slave trader (Planet of the Apes). There is literally no movie he cannot make more watchable by his presence, and as the emotional center of this movie, he can do everything from steal money from his mother to chug that spit bucket and, because we also get to see him wax admiringly about the tender care needed to cultivate the touchy pinot noir grape, we like him.
It often seems like not a whole lot is happening, or that it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere extraordinary. But Sideways sneaks up on you, and you suddenly notice that around the charm and detail that has you smiling in your seat, you’ve suddenly ended up in some very surprising places (like the deeply weird mission Miles must undertake to retrieve a lost wallet, or an absurd conversation about whether a crashed car looks crashed enough), and that they have had everything to do with the flavor of this thing.