Sideways
I finally got around to checking out Sideways and, considering how much I’ve become a fan of Alexander Payne’s work since About Schmidt blew me away, I was excited to see it. Needless to say, Sideways did not disappoint. This comedy-drama is an intelligent and touching, yet often tragic, look at relationships and loneliness through the eyes of a depressed writer that doesn’t seem to have anything in his life going the way he thinks it should. Sideways uses the culture of wine to drive home its point about maturity and reaching a “peak”, creating a very intelligent metaphor and providing some interesting commentary on the way about wine and wine country.
Sideways stars the wonderful Paul Giamatti as Miles, a single divorced unpublished writer that works teaching English to eighth graders. He doesn’t see much purpose in his life and hinges his entire existence on the basis of whether or not he has a published book. Miles suffers from depression, too, and is on a variety of medication to try to treat his condition. He, to make things even more interesting, is also a lover of wine. It is through his love of wine that Miles finds a sense of belonging and a sense in which he can play “expert” in some sort of way, as he instructs others about what he views as “rights and wrongs” of wine. His passionate hatred of Merlot, for example, represents the depths of his obsession.
Miles is taking his friend, Jack (Thomas Haden Church) on one last trip before Jack gets married. Jack is an actor, but only to the extent that he was a former soap actor and now does a wide array of commercials. He fancies himself quite the ladies man and is planning the trip with Miles around the notion of getting laid one last time (or one last bunch of times) before he ties the knot. Jack is actually the antithesis of Miles, which makes for an interesting relationship. Jack takes advantage of Miles throughout the entire course of the weekend and Payne’s film gives us a glimpse into one-sided friendships with his examination of how Miles and Jack work things out. Jack wants to use the trip to sow his wild oats, whereas Miles wants to “play some golf, drink some wine, eat some good food.”
The trip is through wine country in California, which Payne captures with unique texture. As with About Schmidt, Payne utilizes the people of the area in a realistic way and doesn’t cut to shots of “better looking” actors in order to save the day. His people look real and when we travel with Miles and Jack to wine country, we feel it and we feel as though we have gone with them. The walks up the side of the highway past the car dealership to get to the restaurant, for example, are so intelligently captured by Payne that we begin to feel ourselves making the same walk on trips we have taken, listening to the buzz and rush of highway traffic as we make our way somewhere similar. Sideways works on so many different levels, but one of its grandest is the injection of culture to each scene without needing to take a trip somewhere else. Payne’s love is truly within the smaller communities of America, introducing us to people and stories with a lot of heart.
Miles and Jack eventually meet up with a waitress, Maya (Virginia Madsen), that Miles knows and they arrange time to hang out. Along the way, Jack picks up Stephanie (Sandra Oh), who is a winery employee that knows Maya. They hang out and party together and eventually Jack and Stephanie begin a sexual relationship, creating a very awkward situation as Stephanie has no idea that Jack is getting married within a few days. Jack starts professing his “love” to Stephanie and even muses about moving up to wine country to help raise her child. Eventually this all falls apart and, before it’s over, we see Jack trying his hand with another woman. This intention towards sexuality in behalf of Jack is paralleled by Miles and his intentions, as he begins a fairly slow fall with Maya. They talk while Jack and Stephanie screw and Payne covers this nicely by showing us the differences in characters, leaving us to wonder how Jack and Miles ever got along and what their friendship is based on. By the end of Sideways, it’s clear that Miles is wondering the same thing.
A lot of what Sideways is and isn’t is wrapped up in the details of this intelligent film. Miles’ book, for example, with its hilariously pretentious title “The Day After Yesterday” is actually a portrait of what the film is. Each person is living their very own “day after yesterday” within various contextual realities, with Miles being the focal point of the film and its most important voice. When Miles cracks open the 1961 vintage alone at a fast-food restaurant and starts a new life of sorts, we realize what that means. When Miles explains how to taste wine and how to savour the flavours, we realize what that means because we’ve been there before in our own lives. Sideways isn’t anymore about wine than it is about people and the people that grow, evolve and move like the wine within the bottle. Like wine, people are different from one day to the next. As Maya’s beautiful monologue points out, “a bottle of wine is different today and different tomorrow” – or something like that.
The whole notion behind Sideways is about the character of Miles, basically. It’s about how Miles relates to everyone else, about what he intends to do with his life, and about how much of his life he thinks he has wasted. Payne’s film beautifully captures the falling of a man and then, just before the finish, lifts him up just high enough to give us hope with the final shot of the film. We root for Miles, despite his failings. Maybe we root for Miles because most of his trespasses are trespasses against himself and so many of us can relate to that type of thing. He is a great friend, even sneaking into a home to recover Jack’s wallet, but Miles is a pretty crappy friend to himself. That’s the idea behind Sideways and that’s what makes it one of the most intelligently tragic films in recent memory.
Trailer:
