5 out of 5 stars

A few pages ago, Francis Ford Coppola sold his wines to make an oversized, soporific doggerel out of nimbuses and curlicues, giving you the faecal impactions of a lifetime. Yet just a few more pages back, Alexander Payne (The Holdovers) was out in Wine Country buying the wines to merely test his palate and have a good time soaking in Californian sunshine, and what came of it was nothing short of extraordinary.

The corked and dry Rex Pickett novel from which Sideways was adapted, reads—at least from the few pages of eyesores I’ve allowed myself to graze through—like a middling, insecure high school English teacher’s collage of word salads he taped on his bedroom wall (countless publishers passed it before landing on Payne’s desk). But it gave Payne the milieu and the metaphor he needed to be inspired by, and the personalities to dilute according to his sensibility. His screenplay, co-written with his regular Jim Taylor, retains some of the novel’s brittle self-image and insolence in tone but takes the edge off them by turning them inside out silly. The effect is a first-rate farce: Payne held a mirror to Pickett’s grumpy face and said “See the egg on your face?”

Born to Greek restaurant owners in Omaha, Nebraska—smack dab in the middle of heartland America, “the Gateway to the West”—Payne was the humour columnist for the high school paper, a bright young journalist to be. When push comes to shove, though, he chose UCLA Film over Columbia Journalism after graduating from Stanford, and his thesis featurette, The Passion of Martin (1990), was to be his entry ticket to the industry. Hot on the heels of Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, he’s part of what jumped out of the box minutes to the new millennium with Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes, Spike Jonze, and Charlie Kaufman. Stylistically, he’s the most classical and least subversive of them: to the late-1990s American indie wave, he’s what Éric Rohmer was to the French New Wave in the 1960s. He’s also, however, the most balanced in cadence.

Here’s just one way to tell: his exceptional casting of second-string, underused talents. Paul Giamatti, playing Miles the paunchy wine aficionado, cautiously pessimistic about his third strike at a book deal, had only one notable leading role before this in American Splendor (2003). (Whereas Thomas Haden Church, who played opposite him as Miles’ college roommate groom-to-be Jack, had none). But his magnetic charisma is immediately apparent from the moment he opens his mouth. It’s not the same kind of bearing as an Obama or an Elvis: Giamatti has neither the congenial sway nor the sex appeal. It’s more the bitter, beatnik swing of a disillusioned, headstrong literary critic, who uses his wit and rhythm to make up for his below-par physicality and nasal voice; beer cheese with sprinkles of fresh chives, tangily tasteful.

The way he talks, it’s like he’s letting the theatre kid in him take over, forgetting to shake loose that gentlemanly sardonic intonation which gave him his veneer of security. And Payne saw right through it to his character. In one tasting, Miles comments: “quaffable, but far from transcendent.” As the audience, we see how his verdict bounces right back to his own life of middle-age lethargy and depression the way he himself can’t. How else could he have been so confident in his delivery? Selfishness goes hand in hand with a lack of self-consciousness, which Giamatti shows, and understands. How else could he have played Miles’ self-absorption with such grace and texture?

Church hasn’t got much to show for on his resume when George Clooney was still being considered for the part, but his casting proves a stroke of genius, not least because he, like Jack, is himself a fading sitcom star just getting by with cheap commercial works. His neanderthal facial features, saxophonic low-pitch voice, and brawny physique seem to fit Jack’s inconsiderate boyishness like a shoo-in, making such a droll contrast with Giamatti (whereas Clooney would’ve just distracted us with his star persona). He’s the sock, and Giamatti’s the buskin.

Dreading his future life of marriage with Christine, Jack goes up to the Wine Country with old pal Miles to get a taste of life before it expires—in a week. It’s not as if his marriage is like pronouncing a death sentence if what he had ordered for his last meal is a fling. But is it better than death? Or worse? Single mother sommelier Stephanie (Sandra Oh) gets to be the woman in honour. Drunk on her bad-girl persona and sexual prowess (Payne’s sick joke was to get his wife to play this promiscuous part), Jack hangs the loveless Miles out to dry, and his ambivalence over his love for Christine only entrenches. He’s so high up there in newfound pleasures he fantasises about aborting his marriage altogether and settling down in the country and living happily forever after; he jumped on the fence, and went over it.

The pair of them don’t cut very deep as far as characters go, probably thanks to Pickett. But then again, we are not asking for much. Sandra Oh plays the bohemian mistress with such ease and flair, and Church with such horniness and masculine mirth, that their unsophistication does not bother you. The main stars of the show are Miles and his muse waitress Maya (played by a mellow, resplendent Virginia Madsen). They are the ones bearing the film’s emotional weight.

With the seductive charm of her early years gone, Madsen somehow has never been more lovely. Her character does not escape the male fantasy in the material: she is Miles’ placid pixie dream girl, a fellow divorcee who shares his passion for Pinot noir, and who is direct and hospitable whereas Miles is hesitant and evasive. Visionless filmmakers look everywhere for a new premise, new subversion of genre, new character type, anything to get ahead of the curve and avoid the “trope-heavy” indictment. Payne, on the other hand, does what practically no one else now has the guts to do: he embraces his tropes and makes them sparkle.

The secret to his recipe is humanisation. One night at Stephanie’s after dinner at a restaurant, Maya and Miles go to the back of the house while Jack and Stephanie are getting worked up for bed. Not at all a ladies’ man, Miles has to lead in with something like “How long have you been into wine?” When Maya asks about his preference for Pinot, he awkwardly chuckles and says “I don’t know, I don’t know.” He brings up the fact that it is a “thin-skinned, temperamental” grape, which only the most delicate and patient of growers, who “really takes the time to understand [its] potential, can then coax it into its fullest expression.”

We may mistake it for projection, but Giamatti, playing the man of “taste”, doesn’t mince words. Miles is so deep in his reflection and discrimination of taste that he himself is no longer in focus as a point of reference, so any projection there was, it’s not conscious to him. He’s not aware of how vulnerable he sounds to Maya, or us, still less the unintended parallel between him and his Pinot. To her, though, his candidness was his letting down of guards, his invitation for her to open up. And so she did, by consciously elaborating on Miles’ unconscious metaphor from her angle.

To quote anything she said would be to rob you of the sheer, inexplicable emotional power of the scene. So subtle in modulation and control, yet with such stirring, lyrical intensity, it’s like two soulmates’ exchange of poems, each trying to match and respond to the other’s style and feelings. Only, Miles was cut down to size, overcome with the realisation of what has just been going on. By the time he finds his balance, however, his chance is gone. When he finally kisses Maya shortly afterwards, the timing is overripe—her invitation for his kiss had long expired, diegetically as well as dramatically.

Throughout the whole sequence, the focus stays on the two, every twitch in the lips, every knit in the brows, and every pensive gaze, are captured in close-ups, and the whole emotional journey is all the more textured for it. One can’t say what’s gotten into Payne the Stanford goody-two-shoes, with his suave manners and scholastic mien, to make him want to humorise and humanise some deeply flawed and lowdown figures, whom you’d spit on in real life and slip out the backdoor should they pay you a visit. No one, however, can misconstrue the sentimentalist that he is.

Sideways is the apotheosis of his humanism: our diamonds in the rough no longer just make a pass on somebody else’s wife, or meddle in their daughter’s relationships. Payne doesn’t hold back how loathsome and despicable they can get, but he also lifts the atmosphere up with breezy smooth jazz and the natural charm of the characters that we’re not even aware of our cutting-slack. In many ways, the film is the American offshoot of European summer resort satires of bourgeois leisure—Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Jacques Deray’s The Swimming Pool (1969), and many of Éric Rohmer’s including Pauline at the Beach (1983)—beginning with expectation of love and affection, slowly devolving into mean-spirited conflicts of temperaments, brick by brick, incident by incident. We identify so viscerally with Jean Seberg’s self-centred rebel Cecile or Alain Delon’s angsty failed writer Jean-Paul, we’re practically hopping on board with them and readying to sail with all their faults. Except, what Payne offers ends on a note of ambiguous hope rather than fatalism and death. A modern romantic, he sees the everyman’s potential to overcome the flaws of their own volition.

You wouldn’t think Payne, a film school kid proper, would have the taste most of his peers lacked. If Woody Allen represents the gleamed, urbane side of New York City, and Martin Scorsese its dark, tormented underbelly, then he and the Coen Brothers might be said to have a similar relationship with their respective impressions of the backcountry: one subtly absurd yet humane, the other demented and vaudeville. But in my opinion, Payne has much more in common with the Jonathan Demme of Melvin and Howard (1980), Something Wild (1986), and Married to the Mob (1988) than Allen, Scorsese, or the Coens.

Right from the opening of Election (1999), it’s a foregone conclusion how much of a grip on mood and tone he’s got; where most directors struggled to get down to a science, to him and Demme it all seems perfectly effortless and natural like brushing teeth before bed. Using the form of popular schlock, they work you up so good you’re constantly one wheeze away from cracking up, usually without knowing what you’re going to crack up at—sometimes it’s not even in the dialogue or the acting, just the way the camera moves or how the images were shuffled can seem funny.

Perhaps because of his Greek upbringing, the dialectic of comedy and tragedy also seems but child’s play to Payne. In one montage sequence of Miles and Jack’s first dinner with Maya and Stephanie, an atmosphere of merriment can come under the shadow of melancholy in just a matter of seconds without you even noticing it. The transition conveys such seamless visual poetry between smiles and tears, that by the end, your heartstrings are all shattered. It’s pure movie magic. It may be that you make better art when you do not “try” to, like Manny Farber’s termites eating away at the edges of film as an artistic medium.

USA | 2004 | 127 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH • ARMENIAN • FRENCH

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Cast & Crew

director: Alexander Payne.
writers: Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor (based on the novel by Rex Pickett).
starring: Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh, Marylouise Burke, Jessica Hecht, MC Gainey, Alysia Reiner, Lee Brooks & Missy Doty.