Stop Your Wining: Sideways

How incredibly refreshing it is to see an Alexander Payne film. A director of hilarious, intelligent, and often equally poignant comedies, Payne has trained his camera on the places, and more incisively, the people of America that somehow exemplify the “average” or “common” folk, or if those words come off as condescending (the last thing Payne is), the anyway less-than-perfect. In the 1970s, this fact alone would not be so unusual, but in a blockbuster culture that worships celebrity and outward beauty, Payne’s “like it really is” films, populated with often overweight men and women of underweight success, arrive on the scene as subtle jabs to the fakery and excess of the Big Studio offerings. Beyond their bonus work as reality checks on the Hollywood machine, these films— chief among them, Election (1999) and About Schmidt (2002)— repay repeated viewing, rich as they are with moments of high and low comedy and emotionally believable and fleshed out characters.

Sideways (2004), co-written with his longstanding co-screenwriter, Jim Taylor, from Rex Pickett’s novel, is Payne’s most mature and compelling film to date, a far cry from the funny but often cheaper satire of Citizen Ruth (1996). As with About Schmidt, the basic form is that of the road trip, specifically one in which the lives of rather inconsequential people are stirred to some epiphany, some fleeting glimpse of flight for otherwise flightless and humble birds.

The balding, pudgy and depressed middle-aged writer, Miles Raymond, is reeling from his recent divorce (i.e. his wife fled in a hurry). The film spans a single week leading up to the wedding of Miles’ former college roommate, Jack, a “has been” TV minor star with disheveled good looks and a suitably California “positive outlook” on everything. The two friends could hardly be less alike, which makes their relationship somehow all the more appealing to watch (think of Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple”). Miles, for all his neuroses, crippling nostalgia, self-pitying and grumbling, is an extremely discerning lover of wine, and obviously a lover of language and culture. With women, he is also exceedingly picky, unwilling to waste a second of trivial chatter on anyone and only interested in the rare woman who can hold her own in wine worship and generally deeper appreciations of things. Jack is hilariously indiscriminating with respect both to wine and women, with a seemingly limitless desire for both. Miles wants to take Jack on the road, through California’s Santa Ynez Valley, for a wine tasting tour, an oenophile’s wedding gift. Jack just really wants to get laid before tying the knot. He also wants Miles to finally break out of his funk, and to find a woman, too. The cross purposes of the two friends is what yields the comic and poignant fruits, in abundance.

Sideways, as with all of Payne’s films, is extremely well cast. As Miles, Paul Giamatti, who played the scabrous and glowering Harvey Pekar in American Splendor, is a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and yet his explosive rage is held in check by an overriding sense of decency, and a fear of making scenes. In some respects, he has merely given up after a life of failures. A character who in the real world might prove alienating or perhaps invisible, is here portrayed with scene-chewing rawness and ambivalence, a coiled spring that may or may snap. Of course, a brilliant and guided-but-meandering script contributes immensely to the depth of character, but it takes an actor of Giamatti’s conviction and imagination to make Miles as sympathetic as he is. Thomas Hayden Church, who plays the Don Juan, Jack, is another case in Payne’s films of a near-caricature who suddenly bears a soul, a vulnerability, beneath the façade. Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh, as the wine-loving women the men meet and woo along their journey, are also excellent— charismatic, unassuming as “stars,” and perfectly believable as real people.

One of the loveliest things about Sideways is the contrast between its style and content. As with About Schmidt, Payne employs a rather distanced and rectilinear approach to his camera work, and yet the unpredictable proceedings unravel with the chaotic, or at the very least, meandering shape of real life (or my life, not to be presumptuous). The effect is of form rescuing the messy lives and narrative from spinning out of control, and conversely, of the content pushing against the cool outlook framing it. Put slightly differently, the match resembles the classical marriage of intellect and body, the first striving for Apollonian poise, the latter, for a good ol’ Dionysian satiety. Considering Miles and Jack represent these polar extremes— the overly intellectual and the overly-sexed— and that the Greek gods of wine personify these battling qualities, the sophisticated camera and bawdy, zigzagging tale make for a blessed harmony of opposites.

Sideways is not played for the big laughs, and yet in its deadpan delivery and reserved tone, offers plenty of genuine laughter— often of a sort that borders on the uncanny and embarrassing pain of recognition and identification. Squalid or antiseptic though the surroundings are in Payne’s films (this being no exception), and on the face of it, filled with quasi-losers, loners, misadventures, and outright misery, it must be the case that the director and his collaborators are defiant optimists. I invariably feel better after watching their movies.