Review of Sideways

by Roger Baldwin

Jim Taylor and Alexander Payne (Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt) have been heralded young Turks since the mid-1990s, often grouped with David O. Russell (Spanking the Monkey, Flirting With Disaster, Three Kings), Wes Anderson (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) and Paul Thomas Anderson (Hard 8, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love). Idiosyncratic writer-directors who have energized the past decade of cinema with reliably-fresh, personal voices. In a surge of synchronicity, as they clamor into middle-age, almost simultaneously Russell has released I Heart Huckabees, Wes Anderson The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and, for Taylor and Payne, by far their least cynical and warmest work, Sideways. Which also makes it their most conventional, perhaps it's a function of forties' sensibilities.

Late in Sideways, Miles (Paul Giamatti—none of the leads have last names) tells his buddy Jack (Thomas Hayden Church), "I'm not necessary. Half of my life is over and I've got nothing to show for it." This theme stalks Taylor-Payne's work. They have made careers of astutely observing Middle America schlumps, people we have known, or talked to, or heard others talk to, and thought there but for the grace of God. Those easy to dismiss as absurd or inconsequential, but given another look or two you pay closer attention. At their noblest, as in many of Mike Leigh's films, or Jonathan Demme's Melvin and Howard, or Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller, they render up complexities and meaning and good will in people who are destined to live small lives; they give vitality to the losers in an unfair, Darwinian struggle. Taylor-Payne explore the limited in ways that are imminently human, these are people whose aspirations groan under their inability to reach them, yet they carry on, with determination and aplomb, as best they can.

Taylor and Payne's tendencies can also be unkind, sometimes cruel, especially with secondary characters, who often trespass into the ridiculous (be they hawking Ponzi schemes with the zeal of a born-again, recklessly and pathetically falling in love with their high school students or various other indignities). They have a predator's instinct for targeting the awkward and socially inept. But the chronology of their movies have ascended something of an evolving hierarchy of sympathy and identification. Ruth Stoops in Citizen Ruth (1996) was a single-watt bulb and single teenager from a broken home whose favored hobby consists of huffing spray paint. Her unplanned pregnancy generates a titanic political clash between pro-life and pro-choice forces, but she is only dimly aware of the issues involved and takes an interest only after both sides agree to pay her off, either to abort the fetus or bear the child. She'll side with the highest bidder. Ruth, unlike those surrounding her, suffers neither from ideology nor sanctimony, she sort of understands where her self-interest lies. She may possibly be demented but, with marvelous assistance from Laura Dern's gung-ho channeling, draws more shrieking rapture from the few promising moments in her embattled and meager life than any of the more advantaged in the film. Ruth is spontaneous, she lives off her instincts, although her instincts are not wise; her sincerity is less than admirable, but never less than sincere. I both cringed at and envied her.

Matthew Broderick's Jack McAllister, in Election (1999)—their most caustic satire, one of our most razor-sharp satires—keeps telling us how he loves his job. Jack's an award-winning high-school teacher, actively involved in his students' extracurricular sports and drama activities. But his insistent voiceovers about his good life are too often flatly contradicted by the scenes he's describing, his life is one of sanguine self-denial. And he is locked in a losing power struggle with Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon), a hell-bent-for-leather senior with potential for the success he will never have, and he wants to crush her. I respected his accomplishments and drive and commitment, but in the end thought, as he hurled his slushee at the back of a limo, "god, what a chump."

Taylor-Payne climbed a higher plateau of matured nuance in About Schmidt (2002). Jack Nicholson's Warren Schmidt, at age 66, is fixated with leaving his signature on a world he feels he is soon to depart. As a recently retired, assistant vice-president and actuary at an insurance company, where he believed he made a difference, he spent 40 years calculating behind a desk which was readily reoccupied by the next eager young blood. He realizes belatedly and forlornly that he won't be missed, and subsequently hopes to redeem his life in retirement. Mostly he makes a mess of it, but his failures are intimate and familiar and, in their way, quite lovely.

Satire often makes us feel superior to those being parodied, but Taylor-Payne make me deeply uncomfortable. At first I laughed at Dern, Broderick and Nicholson, at what initially appeared as very broad, even ludicrous caricatures. But it gradually becomes apparent that these are real people, flawed people, like many people, probably folks the writers encountered in their native Omaha, Nebraska. They can be fools, but there's little satisfaction in making fun of them, no more than watching some diligent kid botch his event in the special Olympics. As children, many of us were told that if we put our minds to it, we could be anything we wanted, if we did our best we would succeed. Taylor-Payne bury this lie, our best is, as often as not, painfully inadequate. Their movies celebrate Americana with a hard and merciless simpatico.

The Farrelly brothers, with lesser ambitions (in There's Something About Mary, Me Myself and Irene, Shallow Hal, etc.), crudely embrace the physically deformed and mentally retarded as blood brothers. Their juvenile potshots at children of a lesser god, which would be offensive if anyone else said them, come across without a murmur of condescension (these were their childhood friends, and they worked with others in outreach programs). The Farrelly's are insiders, their sophomoric mockery gives their jokers a sweet humanity, they fuse the politically incorrect to an abiding, populist affection. Taylor and Payne approach their people differently—as sympathetic, but clinical, cultural anthropologists, the camera and script study them slowly and methodically. Their characters' flaws are character flaws, they achieve at most a partial redemption, by their films' ends we are left deliberately ambivalent. Much of what we see in these people is kind of repugnant. They can be petty and selfish and vain, and small-minded and short-sighted and dishonest, and yet they have ambitions, many of them are extraordinarily earnest, they see in themselves a largeness and goodness and attempt to act on those self-perceptions. The success of Taylor-Payne's portraits lies in striking a delicate and persuasive balance between the ugly and endearing, how the two inharmoniously and unavoidably coexist; in mining the easily cartoonable for their shared, empathetic qualities. And mostly in illuminating the universal fragility of human character. Frail reeds are we, they say, and don't think some combination of fickle destiny or incompetent parenting or small-town influences might have spared you, too, from being a buffoon.

Sideways takes an unexpected turn from their earlier films, it is their first located outside the flyover flats of Omaha, beginning in San Diego and motoring north—to Oxnard, Solvang, Buellton, Los Olivos—and their first to introduce people that could be us, rather than those we feel fortunate we never became. It is a road movie and a buddy movie, and a romance movie, one with deep emotional dysfunctions, structured around wine—its science and its poetry, its pretentiousness and embarrassing, over-indulgent excesses.

Alexander Payne as director gives us some sweeping vistas, a multiple-screen shot, ostrich heads, a light jazz-folk score to frame the moods. As his characters conversed and made out in a wine cave, I felt the awe of medieval monks at Notre Dame. But generally his camera is not flamboyant, his skills are deceptively simple. Payne commits his talents to his actors, and the ensemble cast is uniformly dazzling. Sandra Oh as Stephanie is not as filled out as the rest, but as a "pour chick" in a local winery she radiates heat from her 1st sizzling close-up, she's a firecracker. Stephanie has an instinctive gift for casually distilling joy from the moment, something Miles resents and covets. Virginia Madsen's unassuming performance as Maya—a recent divorcee whom Miles initially dismisses as just a waitress—is absolutely winning in its soft, stripped-down directness and integrity. In a story where honesty is currency, Jack and Miles are deceptive or self-deceiving, but Maya is as genuine as she originally appears. She is as close to perfect as anyone they've invented (although except for Citizen Ruth, all their screenplays are adapted from novels). "She's got a lot of soul," Jack says, an apt observation. Maya is focused, she's somber, but never dreary or dull. And mature, oh so mature, I want her to be my girlfriend.

Yet Sideways is, as much as anything, a male-bonding movie. Miles and Jack launch a wine-tasting spree to blow off steam the week before Jack's wedding to Christine, a lithe Armenian beauty. Thomas Hayden Church as Jack is an agreeably out-there Southern California dude, with inviting valley-guy inflections, he likes most everybody, especially women, he's a natural flirt and life-long pussy hound (like so many bachelors in so many wedding movies, his feet grow cold days before the ceremony, he doesn't know if he can bring himself to commit. So here he has an affair). Jack's a television actor whose glory days are behind him (as is Church himself, once a regular on NBC's Wings). He's now resigned to voice-overs in the occasional low-budget TV commercial, but he remains incurably chipper and upbeat, about his career and his life, he always has a plan, someone we would want as a friend because of his puppyish devotion, unshakable self-confidence and readiness to seize the day. He's a good time and Miles, sadsack that he is, latches onto the adventure. Jack considers himself Miles' motivational therapist, and doles out some pretty crackpot advice ("Get your book in the libraries and let the public decide!"). It's nearly impossible to figure out what the two have in common, but moreso not to imagine their being fast friends (Miles is Jack's best man), a hectoring and fractious, but inseparable odd couple since their dorm days twenty-some years ago at San Diego State. Effortlessly making their unlikely bond seem like the natural order is one of the film's singular achievements.

The picture ultimately belongs to Paul Giamatti as Miles, it's his study and his nebbishly-commanding performance. Some of my friends didn't like the movie because they don't like Miles. He's crabby and peevish, at times a real jerk, and they found little redeeming value in him. But he is a litmus test for Taylor-Payne's mixed messages. Miles is an unpublished novelist and 8th-grade teacher, an unlikely candidate to replace Cary Grant as romantic lead. He's petite and pod-shaped, the camera darts in on his woolly shoulders, his eyes have a Rodney Dangerfield hyperthyroid bulge. But here he is the man, a neurotic Woody Allen progeny who most convincingly (well, most likely) gets the girl, I believed in him, and rooted for him. Miles is talented, but unaccomplished. He works the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink on his creaking Saab's steering column as he hurtles along the freeway for a late appointment. Those few who have read his unmarketable fiction agree that it is innovative, quality work. And he knows wine, it is his hobby and also his life's calling. His palate is sophisticated and precise, his expertise articulate, if sometimes generic and pompous, ("it's quaffable, but far from transcendent," he grunts at a tasting—he uses his superiority as a defense mechanism). Miles' passion is involving and life-affirming, his metaphors in talking about it let us know it informs so many levels of his life. This makes him a giant among men in an otherwise undistinguished and frustrated existence.

Wine is also an obstacle, Miles is something of a problem drinker. His love for expensive and complex pinot noir's ("I live from bottle to bottle," he says in a different context), like a beggar's Thunderbird or five-dollar gin, skirts the edges of alcoholism. He is a connoisseur and, when stressed, a drunkard. And stress is his M.O. He considers himself a doomed, would-be novelist (in a surprisingly unsubtle scene—Taylor-Payne are usually reluctant to make overt declarations—he announces over the phone, to an answering machine, "Really, I'm not much of a writer. I'm not much of anything, really"). His insecurities, two years after being dumped by Victoria, his ex-wife (Jessica Hecht), leave him terrified of, and belligerent about, pursuing romantic relationships, for fear of rejection. Miles is morally compromised, he lies when convenient and remorsefully steals money from his delightful, eager-to-please and neglected mother. He has perhaps too many extended episodes of silent and not-so-silent self-loathing, piled one on another they can be aggravating and redundant, I got the point early on, these are the only places where the movie sags. But Miles is desperate and paralyzed, at times it seems likely that his portly physique might wither and disappear in shame. He's in mid-life crisis, but then you can easily imagine that he always was.

Miles, in his warped way, can also be a go-getter. There are occasions when a challenge or bad news yanks him out of his sulking inertia and into comically-assertive or self-destructive action: self-righteously chucking a golf ball like a grenade at a group of impatient old farts who dared to invade his putting green (Miles is an eager, but miserable golfer); after hearing that Victoria has remarried, frenetically trotting through a vineyard, with Jack in hot pursuit, as he power chugs a bottle of wine in sprinter's time; in a high point of unembarrassed pathos, when he finds his book rejected yet again, he defiantly douses himself with a spittoon in a touristy, mass-production winery, shamelessly humiliating himself in a place he regards beneath contempt. One of the final scenes, as Miles breaks into the home of a truck driver-waitress couple in the throes of blue-collar passion, veers surreally into a very different, very funny movie. It seals his bond of friendship with Jack, and temporarily clears the air of the vexing shroud of his self-perceived loserdom. When motivated, and that isn't very often, Miles can be resourceful and determined, a mensch.

Giamatti has some glorious epiphanies: outside a restaurant, as he clutches his bottle of Xanax while Jack cautions him about going to the dark side, right before they begin their first dates with Maya and Stephanie (he's looking for a way out)—"If they order Merlot I'm going to leave. I am not drinking any fucking Merlot!"—an explosive, out-of-the-blue comedic triumph, both pretentious and vulnerable (one of the best things about Giamatti's performance is how he intermittently surprises us). At Jack's wedding, after Victoria informs Miles of her pregnancy (her remarriage by itself tears him up, he always envisioned a reconciliation), he balances polite, stoic congratulations and emotional collapse with red-eyed, heartbroken finesse. Best of all, best of all romance scenes in most movies, is his first date with Maya. After they return to Stephanie's from the restaurant where he drank and dialed, he momentarily forgets himself and explains to her his fixation on pinot noir—the grape is temperamental, he says, "not a survivor, responsive only to the most patient and nurturing of growers, only to those who can appreciate its full potential and coax it into its fullest expression; but its flavors are haunting and thrilling and subtle." Swept up in spontaneous reverie, he swept me up, it's his confessional, and unrehearsed, exquisitely passionate verbal foreplay. It turns her on because it shows the best in him, my role model, an everyman as fine as any man. Miles then realizes he's on the verge of love-making, chokes and can't follow through. He beats himself up over it, as he does most every chapter of his life. After a brief, heroic interlude, he reverts back to being Miles. But Maya, mature, so very mature, realizes, quite rightly, she might be onto something.

One gripe about Taylor-Payne's movies, like most movies, is their contempt for public educators. Matthew Broderick's high school teacher in Election was, ultimately, a sad joke. Miles' being stuck in a middle-school English literature class is a hallmark of his failure to achieve anything important (those who can't do anything else teach), the one scene of him working his students is akin to attending a funeral. Miles' love of the written word does not extend to inspiring a future Miles, he seems to regard it as unskilled labor. There's plenty to ridicule in the halls of elementary and secondary education, but it is too convenient a target, cheap shots at teachers are a cottage industry in and out of Hollywood. Given high expectations and low annual salaries, they could occasionally use a bit more support in popular media. We have been gifted with movies like the delightfully vernacular Clueless. But as often what we get are idealistic, maverick vigilantes bucking the system to rescue the salvageable from inner cities (Stand By Me, Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds). The teaching establishment itself is populated with soulless bureaucrats and fascists (the above movies, The Breakfast Club, Dead Poet's Society—with Robin Williams as the sacrificial Christ figure). There's the occasional, good-natured Mr. Holland's Opus, but it's so cloyingly inspirational it makes your teeth hurt.

Taylor and Payne tend to fix their attentions on mediocre or middle-of-the-road people battling anonymity and obscurity, on ordinary individuals waging private crusades against insignificance; or as Martin Luther King wrote of black folk in 1963, just before the Civil Rights Movement permitted them entry into civilization, those "forever fighting a degenerating sense of nobodiness." This drama plays out daily, and by the millions. Few American filmmakers treat it with greater acuity. In Sideways, they tilt their conclusion toward hope. But the strength of their work, why they matter, rests not on turns of plot, but rather in fleshing out the meaty fibers of wannabe's staking their rightful, if unrealistic, claims to respectability. And in making us identify with them, and care about them, disfiguring warts and all.

Read about Sideways in the Internet Movie Database

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