Sideways | Review

Payne explores the notion of life without a compass.

His text combines a wry sense of humor with a profound understanding for the darker moments in humanity, his characters are flavorful and his stories swirl around taboo territories and feelings. Smell and taste are integral parts to the enjoyment of wine, and what separates filmmaker Alexander Payne’s work from the rest of the crowd lies exactly in the quality of his filmmaking and storytelling ingredients.

There is a world of difference between tasting wine, and drinking it – and the characteristics that separate a good bottle from a bad one are thematically applied to the characterizations of two men in Jack and Miles, who both feel as if their lives are a little past their expiration date. This road trip through California’s wine country does contain a nutty flavor to it; Paul Giamatti plays the man who has reached the lowest point in his midlife crisis, while his friend, (Thomas Haden Church) a has-been actor, tries to give some sort of life to his dismal existence by inserting the word “action” into his getaway trip. Co-writers Payne and Jim Taylor take the wine subplot and the over-40 without a future and without much past portion from Rex Pickett’s novel and create an entire examination where wine drinking becomes a parable for life and squeezes out a screenplay that explores the theory that if you wait too long to open that vintage bottle or seize that moment in life then, – one can expect a vinegar result.

Sideways tilts the bottle and looks at life from a different perspective, Payne’s aroma-filled comedic text captures the art of whining and of wine tasting and loads his text with subtlety and dually implied meanings with Giamatti incarnating some American Splendor’s Harvey Pekar traits for the role. His character of Miles is the poster boy for that moment in life where you feel as if you haven’t amounted up to much – it is painfully amplified in the sequence where his character visits his mother. His character’s existence is measured with painful moments of realization and capped with a couple of empowering ones – the deep discussion with the character played by Virginia Madsen is the film’s most remarkable sequence – it sees a discussion about wine slowly build up as an admission of inner feelings. With a darkly warm humor, Payne’s dialogue is loaded in intelligent innuendos that avoids cliché – the viewer gets into the skin of these characters precisely because the character speak from the heart even while many parts of the film reaches for a zany moments. The film is easily uneventful in terms of the visuals – even the camera angles paint a rather uninspired canvas, but that same canvas is the perfect location for tying the romantic notion of wine tasting with issues of a broken heart.

Payne loves to watch the people at their lowest points – his characters are a breed that are contingently comprised of humiliation and humanity and Sideways is no different. This is the kind of film that valorizes the emotions of its characters, and despite the delicious off-key buffoonery, this flavored vintage captures the emotional spectrum of the male psyche. Though it may be tough to top his last two in Election and About Schmidt, Payne slightly alters his climatic space – he replaces noir edginess with more comically observant moments and thankfully this is a wallpaper that doesn’t distract from the character build-up. Look for this film come Oscar time, this is a toast to great writing, great directing and great acting and is good till the last drop.

Rating 4.5 stars