Sideways (2004)

Sideways: 2004, dir. Alexander Payne. Seen at Arbor Great Hills (Jan. 15).
Sideways was an enjoyable movie, although I don’t see why so many people feel it ought to be raking in the big awards. But then I feel that way about most of the 2004 movies that have been nominated for Oscars and other yearly awards.
It took me awhile to get to the theater to see Sideways, and not just because I am a procrastinator and lazy and all that. I got the impression that this was a movie about two guys going through a mid-life crisis, and I could not have been less interested. But then people started talking about Paul Giamatti, whom I enjoyed very much in American Splendor. I heard further rumbling about Thomas Haden Church and Virginia Madsen. And then everyone was going on about A.O. Scott saying that critics only liked this movie because Giamatti’s character was the type to appeal to most critics, who would sympathize with such a person. Somehow I found that weirdly tempting.
And then it took us two or three weeks to see the movie because it kept selling out whenever we wanted to go.
I realized after seeing Sideways why it was that everyone was telling me to go see it for this performance or that one, and talking about the actors rather than the movie as a whole. This movie is as good as it is because of the actors in it. If it had been differently cast, it would be a much less entertaining film, if not downright unpleasant.

Sideways isn’t a movie about men going through mid-life crises, or at least I didn’t see it that way. It’s a road-trip movie in which two guys who were college roomies decide to take a tour of the California wine country before one of them gets married. Miles (Giamatti) is a perennial loser who totes around a huge manuscript for an epic novel that no one wants to publish (and when he describes it, you can’t really blame the publishers), who drinks heavily under the guise of being a wine expert, and when he’s drunk likes to call his ex-wife, whom he’s never really gotten over. If it weren’t for Giamatti, there is no way I would want to watch this guy in action.
Jack (Church) is a faded actor who is out to pick up just one more chick (or two) before settling down to marriage. Again, apt casting (all anyone ever seems to remember about Church is his stint from Wings) and good acting pulls this role above the stereotypical outgrown frat boy and into something memorable. Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh play the women the guys encounter on their trip. Like many female supporting characters in Guy Movies, they’re fairly two-dimensional and not well written, but the actresses (particularly Madsen) do a good job with slim material.
There is a certain snobbery inherent in the movie. The filmmakers assume that the audience members fall into a certain demographic. We should know who Bukowski is. We should recognize a clip from The Grapes of Wrath. Although we don’t have to know a lot about wine, we should appreciate the setting of the California wine country and be able to distinguish the acceptable wineries from the horrible mass-appeal parody of a winery the characters visit last. The filmmakers show a disdain for people who visit the horrible winery, for waitresses who obviously aren’t college students, like the one Jack meets near the end of the movie, and generally for anyone who isn’t as cultured as the main characters in the movie, including the audience.
Sideways was directed by Alexander Payne and written by Payne and Jim Taylor, and I have noticed a pattern to their movies (which include Election, Citizen Ruth, and About Schmidt). He does not treat his characters with respect. He is a little mocking and sometimes a little contemptuous. When Miles breathes a visible sigh of relief because Maya (Madsen) isn’t a career waitress but is putting herself through college, it feels as though the filmmakers are relieved too … but at the same time, by showing such an action, are they trying to get us to feel disgusted with the character?
I prefer movies where I feel like the writer, director, and actor all actually like the characters. That doesn’t mean the characters have to be likeable to us, but the filmmakers do have to treat even the nastiest characters with a certain amount of respect. Mocking your characters works fine in a movie like Election, in which there are no real heroes, but it can ruin a movie like About Schmidt. It doesn’t quite work in Sideways because even though the characters are losers to the point of occasional sleaziness, we need to sympathize with these guys in order for the movie to be a success. As I have said, the fact that we do sympathize with them appears to be the work of the actors.
I liked Sideways and I am pleased to see that it has done very well in theaters and with critics. But I wish the filmmakers would make a movie about characters they actually like.