SIDEWAYS
Whine Country--Sideways, directed and written by Alexander Payne
One envisions an agent's pitch for Sideways: "Easy Rider (1969) meets Bachelor Party (1984) meets Babette's Feast (1987)!!!" Director/co-writer Alexander Payne's latest film deliciously conflates the male buddy road movie, the pre-marital shindig subgenre (usually depicting male buddies), and a sub-sub-genre of movies about one or another gastronomical obsession (inter alia, Babbette's Feast, Le Grand Bouffe [1973]), and Like Water for Chocolate [(1992]). Some films make you laugh so hard you have to cry. Sideways, like other Payne movies (Citizen Ruth [1996], About Schmidt [2002]) makes you cry so hard you have to laugh.
Sideways comprises both a California on-the-roadhow and a penetrating meditation on the materiality and metaphors of fine wine. Payne's anti-hero buddies are two Peter Pan type confronting midlife angst without a clue. Each man is ironically, compassionately knowing about the other, and deeply unknowing about himself.
Miles Raymond (Paul Giametti) is a chronically dysthymic teacher, writer, oenephile. Awash in maudlin self-pity over a divorce two years ago, Miles pins redemption of his tattered self-esteem on the publication of a autobiographical novel. Jack is an amiably shallow Tinseltown actor, a onetime film and soap-opera second-stringer, reduced to scrambling for commercials and voiceovers.
Throughout their long friendship, Miles' fanatical quest for bibulous ecstasy has paralleled Jack's compulsive pursuit of part-object sex with any vagina available. His craggy good looks and fortunes fading, Jack has opted to marry a prosaic woman and work in her tedious father's real estate business. It's evident that dwindling down into a husband embodies Jack's worst nightmare.
Miles proposes that he and Jack spend the week before the marriage reaffirming their fellowship in the lush San Ynez wine country. Miles has often travelled there solo to drown his despair in Mouton Rothchild -- or shots of rotgut if sufficiently soused. He hopes to tutor Jack in the subtle pleasures of the grape, and implicitly a existence more meaningful than infantile skirt-chasing. Jack wants to resurrect Miles' stagnant libido, while indulging in adultery avant la lettre.
Their hilariously incompatible agendas are underscored during a visit to the first of Miles' treasured boutique wineries. Miles demonstrates the elaborate (and to the uninitiated, faintly sickening) tasting ritual: meticulous decanting the wine, gauging color, shaking and swirling before plunging one's schnozzola deeply into the glass, langorously sluicing one's palate before swallowing; then rendering judgement in absurdist winespeak, waxing rhapsodic about "...flavors of citrus and passion fruit; just the faintest soupcon of asparagus and nutty edam cheese..." Jack meanwhile slurps down his cabernet, chews gum, and ogles every skirt in sight.
Miles and Jack settle into an nondescript motel room. Miles' agent tells him his novel has been rejected, perhaps for the last time. He promptly plunges into drunken self-recrimination about his lost love, failed book, loser life. Jack commences a wild affair with Stephanie (Sandra Oh), a spirited winery hostess. Between orgasms, he nags Miles to stop his chronic kvetching and woo Stephanie's friend Maya (Virginia Masden), a serene enchantress marking time as a waitress in the local diner.
In a typical Hollywood comedy about a glum bum's extreme makeover by a sassy woman, Maya's Julia Roberts would charm Miles' Woody Allen out of his depressive stupor with chippy banter, cheap advice, and breezy soft-porn sex. But Payne refuses any vapid conventions. Miles' timid courtship and Maya's reluctant turning towards him comprise an acutely observed, delicate depiction of love unfolding -- accentuated by their mutual passion about wine.
Miles, high priest of high maintenance, identifies with a magnificent pinot noir: its fragile grapes are immensly difficult to grow and demand painstaking care. Maya muses on the immediate joys of a great wine, paradoxically heightened by one's appreciation of its emphemerality, its evocation of those who labored to make it great.
From its inception, each couple's romance is sullied by male duplicity. Jack hides his nuptials from Stephanie. A practised deceiver, he piquantly deceives himself with a frothy fantasy about cancelling his wedding, marrying Stephanie, opening a winery, living happily and brainlessly ever after. Jack also says that Miles' book is about to be published, and is sure to be a best-seller.
Initially Miles goes along with Jack's lies. One senses this isn't the first time he's covered for his friend's perfidy. He also believes his masquerade as successful author will make him appear less of a loser to Maya. He grows increasingly uneasy about Jack's prevarications as his affection for Maya ripens on the vine. When Miles 'accidentally' spills the beans, the infuriated women send the feckless buddies packing.
The scenes on their way back to Los Angeles partake equally of bedroom farce and unsparing revelation. Jack beds a frumpy roadhouse waitress, barely escapes the murderous wrath of her redneck husband, then realizes he's left his wallet behind with his wedding rings. He tearfully begs Miles to help him with his "plight" by somehow retrieving it.
Coming from an Lalaland airhead like Jack, "plight" rings strange and inutterably sad. Payne is subtly inferring that, somewhere in his superficial psyche, Jack dimly grasps the depth his compulsive promiscuity. But he continues to minimize his pathology -- perhaps hoping to marry his way out of it after Miles cleans up his mess.
Sideway's conclusion recaps its against-the-grain reading of quotidian Hollywood romance. The nuptials go off as planned, with little promise that Jack will change his errants ways beyond toning down his perpetual rutting a bit. Miles meets his ex-wife at the wedding. She's married, pregnant, and her obvious happiness puts paid to his fantasies of reconciliation. The grief behind Miles' bumbling congratulations is palpable. But one also senses a dawning awareness that he might yet renounce his boozy self-pity, stop dining on his own guts and love again. The possibility that Maya could forgive him and accept him back is also hinted at, but carefully left in mid-air.
Giametti gives a finely honed portrayal of a prickly, unprepossessing man floundering in a narcissistic morass. Until Sideways Madsen has largely been wasted in mediocre genre pictures which foregrounded her beauty and neglected her talent. Her Maya is generous, but clear-headed. She harbors no illusions about Miles' flaws, and will not sacrifice herself for him in the trite fashion of so many previous cinematic earth-mothers.
Sandra Oh and Thomas Hayden Church are unknown to me: Oh's role as Stephanie is brief, but she possesses that rare and uncanny knack of conveying her character's suchness. Church wonderfully conveys Jack's abiding affection for Miles, as well as the chasm of uninsightful loneliness underpinning Jack's affability. (Jack's friendship with Miles is the best relationship he has, or is ever likely to have). One hopes to see much more of these gifted people in the future.
In some films the landscape itself constitutes another character. Payne interpolates shots of the sun-dappled hills and vineyards of Santa Ynez between the frenetic quest of Sideway's great babies, Miles and Jack, to recover the imaginary plenitude of their nursery days. The valley's exquisite images seem to declare, Zen-like, that time and wine and all the gracious things of this world lie at our feet, to be cherished now, here, this very minute -- could one refuse the ceaseless chatter of the monkey mind, the raucous clamor of the desiring ego.