***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, and Sandra Oh
Directed by Alexander Payne & written for the screen by Payne and Jim
Taylor, from the novel by Rex Pickett
2004
123 min R
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 2004
Dickens ends "Oliver Twist" by saying something to the effect that Oliver's late mother would certainly find favor with the Lord, because she was weak and she was erring. I like movies like that. I like movies about flawed, weak, well-meaning characters who are often sad because of the mistakes they've made. Sometimes we laugh at them, sometimes we are ashamed of them, and sometimes they even disgust us. But we always like them. They are prisoners to their personalities, just like we all are, and even if "forgive" might be too strong a word for why we still like them after they sin and sin, "understand" is better. If the movie's a good one. If you were born without any serious or interesting personal flaws (or at least think you were), try not to spend all of "Sideways" looking down on these poor slobs.
And so it is with a smile that we quickly realize how the alcoholic's week long trip to California wine country with his best friend the sexoholic is doomed. It's really sweet, when you think about it, how each wants to share with the other the great enthusiasm of his life. Miles, the wine snob (Paul Giamatti of "American Splendor"), wants to teach his friend how to have a deep and sincere love affair with fine wine. Jack, the philandering commercial actor (Thomas Haden Church), wants to get Miles laid. Jack wouldn't mind getting laid either. One loves his drink like we should love women, and the other loves his women with the transience with which we should love wine. The movie is basically plotless, except that Jack has to get back to L.A. after a week to get married. See what I mean by doomed?
These guys are both pieces of work. Miles seems to have wandered out of a Woody Allen, except he forgot to take with him that sense of humor and irony that keeps Woody going despite one failure after another. Miles isn't over his two-year-old divorce, he doesn't have high hopes for his unpublished novel, and he hates his job as an 8th grade English teacher. His early promise and aspirations have been left unfulfilled, and he has turned his self-disgust and pity into a great romance and friend, put on pause only when he gets a good glass of wine.
So it's not surprising that, even if he vehemently condemns Jack's philandering, Miles is too weak, pitiful, and powerless to stop it. That we come out of "Sideways" basically liking Jack is high praise for Church's performance. He could help himself, I suppose, but we understand that self-improvement is just so hard. Life has passed Jack by, in a way; a once-promising career on soap operas has dwindled to announcing TV commercials.
Their victims are a waitress (Virginia Madsen) at Miles's favorite restaurant and an employee at a winery (Sandra Oh). Jack's motives are ultimately dishonorable, although he can convince her and himself otherwise, but Miles has probably had a thing for the waitress for some time. He doesn't like Jack poisoning his perfect world of escape, of great meals and drinks and comfortably detached relationships with waiters, bartenders, and winemakers. Again, he is too ineffectual to protest. Madsen is a revelation here: call me cynical, but actors who never quite reached the A-list during their prime and did movies like "Highlander 2" instead tend to bring elements of weariness, wariness, and resilience to their parts. Think of how Kim Basinger kept missing a really big break, or how a big break like "Batman" never quite panned out, and think of how that informed her otherwise underwritten part in "L.A. Confidential."
If there is a fifth character, it is the wine country itself: the hills, the vineyards, the thin roads, the restaurants, the sun in a cloudless sky, the light meals. It is not a decadent world; neither Miles nor anyone else takes it for granted. He is always grateful and his reverence for a fine meal—baked fish, wild rice, small portions and the precise wine—is not that of a snob waiting for the world to beg for his approval. Nothing's worse than someone who feels he is entitled to everything. That's part of why we like Miles.
"Sideways" is the work of director/screenwriter Alexander Payne, who also made "About Schmidt" and "Election." His style is mostly invisible, but he knows the playful, humorous effect of putting his camera far away and centering his characters perfectly when he wants us to know how awkward they are and how much they don't want to be looked at. Some parts of the film may be a little too self-conscious—the instance in which Miles waxes about the life of a grape as if he were talking about himself is a little "writer-ly," but since Miles is a failed writer he'd probably talk just like that—but this is still the best "dram-edy" of 2004.
Finished Monday, January 24th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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