Life is tragic
to those who think, and comic to those who feel.
—source
unknown to me; cited often enough by lit professors and such (I hope I quoted
it right)
Subsections below:
Two men, one divorced and one a bachelor (not for long), are front and
center
Two unattached women enter the mix
A languorous moment of melancholy makes a rich but isolated appearance
A final fling shows how bad the hi-jinks can get
A restoration of seriousness comes with promise
[Edits 11/9/13. Edit 11/22/13.]
Not that I want to fart in the
face of fans of this film [too much alliteration?], but I am keeping this
review short partly because I haven’t been able to study it as I’d like. It is
also—while arguably Payne’s most entertaining film of the past ~12
years—entertaining in a definitely shallowly fun way.
The general idea of the story,
based on a novel by Rex Pickett, to me is symbolized by one scene when main
characters Miles and Jack are (on their road trip) at a vineyard location, and
when Miles has found from the more bumptious Jack that Miles’ ex-wife and her
new husband are going to be at Jack’s wedding (the big inevitable “goal scene”
of this film), and that Jack has been talking to Miles’ ex-wife…Miles gets so
suddenly incensed—he and Jack are buddies from college—that, quite contrary to
how he usually is with wine (which is an urbane, tasting-skilled connoisseur),
Miles gets out of the car, grabs a bottle of wine from the back seat, yanks off
the already-loose cork with his teeth, and heads off with impulsive, trundling abandon
down a steep hillside, drinking the wine from the bottle like a dopey souse.
This film, in short, is Payne’s
chance to do something about as basic and fun-grabbing, with maybe predictable
results for its characters in terms of the consequences of short-term (and
shortsighted) thrills. There are both elements of a sophomoric bacchanal
(especially on Jack’s part) and a long weekend of effete wine-sampling (which Miles
is trying to school Jack in).
Director Alexander Payne here works with screenwriting partner Jim Taylor and other associates
such as coproducer George Parra and editor Kevin Tent (a making-of doc in the
DVD for The Descendants shows his array
of long-term associates, some going back to his earliest films). Phedon Papamichael (the first name is pronounced “FAY-don,” according to a Sideways DVD comment) is director of
photography here, and seems good at shooting outdoors and sun-sprayed scenes,
with occasional filters, for a sort of hazy/friendly color look—Payne says he
wanted a “pastel”-like “’70s film feel.” (One shot, of the two men’s red car
going into a highway tunnel that I think is near Santa Barbara, is reminiscent
of a similar shot in The Graduate
[1967].) Whether indoors or out, the look seems to be perfectly suited to a
friendly, wandering time in wine country; sometimes you get a sense the film
wants you to feel as if you’re watching a dream.
Two men, one divorced and one a bachelor (not for long), are front and
center
Miles, played by lovable
hangdog-looking Paul Giamatti, is a struggling writer (and English
teacher, his source of pay), whose large novel is being handled by an agent, who
has most lately submitted it to a small press, with word of acceptance not yet
received. Miles, whose depressive side is readily and acceptably enough
commented on by his college-era chum Jack (Thomas Haden Church), has
enough of an “accepting of fate” streak that he is about as ready to accept the
failure of his novel to be published as he can be (which means, not 100
percent; “I have stopped caring,” he claims at one point, but later we’ll find he
still cares, in petulant terms).
Jack, a not-always-employed
actor, often wears loud shirts, untucked, and has tousled, somewhat unkempt
reddish hair and appears in Haden Church’s form like a Mick Jagger (if he
danced as if with scorpions in his pants, that would complete the impression
you get)—while Giamatti in during-the-film commentary says a few times he looks
like a “young Lee Marvin.” Jack is going to get married on a coming Saturday,
and for the ongoing week, he and Miles are going to have a sort of weeklong
“bachelor party” of a vacation time on the road—to wine country, to play
golf…and, as Jack is hungriest for, an affair before such a thing will be
(theoretically) preempted for him by marriage.
The premises are fairly simple.
The struggling, stoical writer and the semi-working, outgoing, randy actor are embarking
on a road trip, and their quest (hardly an original idea, but OK for this film)
of a vacation that celebrates the man about to get married and have a sort of
last big bout of fun before the knot is tied also is an “odd couple” story. And
they represent two archetypes: one, Miles, is the serious, discriminating,
tartly humorous intellectual, here played with enough vinegar yet enough
sensible-to-us perspective by Giamatti, as might really “cramp the style” of
partying types Miles might be with. Miles is like any range of fictional
literary figures, like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or Pynchon’s rather lugubrious Charles
Mason. Meanwhile, as for Jack, the fun-loving “big child” whose pursuit of a
last fling (of the type some of us did when they were reckless frat boys [End note]) leads
him into riotous unforeseen consequences—he is like a still-young Falstaff, or Pynchon’s
bibulous Jeremiah Dixon.
Miles has a “clinical” side,
too; he admits he takes Xanax (an anti-anxiety med) and Lexapro (an
antidepressant); there is a passing remark about his helping his psychologist
with the other man’s computer. Also, there are mentions through the film of
Vicodin (I don’t know who takes it or, if under a doctor’s care, why). Miles
usually drinks wine in some kind of moderation related to his tasting side; but
on occasion, he drinks too much, showing his ongoing melancholy. The film doesn’t
really look at how this aptness to occasionally overindulge in alcohol might be
a bad mix with his using psych meds (and anyway, we don’t watch this kind of
film for that kind of sage guidance).
The two head up to wine country
from their supposed hometown of San Diego (Giamatti and Haden Church point out
that locations labeled by the film with subtitles aren’t always as in real life).
They travel in a red Saab belonging to Miles, and for a starter, they have a
crate of pinot noir with them.
(The two male leads, by the way,
provide the only during-the-film commentary available on the DVD, and what they
mainly do is joke around, such as on how they accidentally look in a shot—they
are quite entertaining, but they don’t do a lot to tell how the film was made
technically, which is what I like about the usual during-the-film commentary,
especially from a director.)
These two aren’t meant to be
entirely virtuous, even aside from the sexual affairs that erupt on Jack’s
side. Miles steals some money from his mother’s stash in a bureau drawer when
they visit her on the way up. The two lie to each other at times (at least,
Miles does to Jack), though they are clearly enough dyed-in-the-wool friends,
despite their sharp personality differences, that they help each other at
crucial junctures (or Miles, more than once, helps the more childish Jack).
Jack sets out his own friend-serving
agenda: his best-man gift to Miles—who he says (or who Miles says?) has been
“officially depressed for two years”—is to get him laid. (The story arc leads
to a point where, as things have come to a sort of fix, Jack proclaims sternly
to Miles, “I am going to get laid before I get married, and I don’t want you to
[****] it up.”)
Two unattached women enter the mix
Not only is this film good-timey
enough that its title gets used as a sort of “automatic association” marketing
“reference point” for Payne’s career (it disappoints me that this sometimes
slapstick-y film is cited as if it was his best or trademark film); it is
accessible enough that when you see on its DVD packaging four youngish faces,
two of them female, you kind of get what this film is generally about.
At one restaurant, the two men
meet Maya (Virginia Madsen), who is waitressing there—she had been
married to a philosophy professor, but it will turn out she got divorced. A
little later they encounter, at one of the wine-tasting places they visit, a
Stephanie, played by Sandra Oh. Stephanie, it turns out, knows Maya (and
Stephanie seems a divorced or never-married mom). The movie reaches a sort of high point when the four
are in a double-date situation at a restaurant, and a photo montage starts to
flow, tastefully edited, with nice performances, and intercut with wine-ad-like
shots of bottles being presented by waiters. The way the two men have
encountered a potential mate for each is one charming aspect of the story. (In
a tasteful later scene at Stephanie’s house, when Miles is alone talking with
Maya, it turns out Maya is doing graduate study in horticulture, so she’s about
as cerebral as Miles, while Jack—in a more precipitous way—seems more
libidinously matched with the slim Stephanie.)
But Payne’s hearty preferred niche
is stories focusing on men in a sort of emotional/spiritual crisis. This is one
of them. But there is a tradeoff for this film, in the process of its meeting
criteria as a kind of big-audience, whoop-with-fun ride: there are copious
scenes of Miles and Jack tasting wine at various sunny locations (Miles is such
a loquacious connoisseur of wines, with his analysis of taste and smell, that
you almost wonder if he is making his articulate assessments up to some extent;
but at a sample that is redolent to Miles of inferiority, Jack, in character,
will opine like a philistine, “Tastes good enough to me!”). To include all the
wine content and the new-dates-then-bawdy-sexual-episodes content, the
component of the melancholic male has to be toned down, or somehow subverted.
A languorous moment of melancholy makes a rich but isolated appearance
Miles fairly often comes across
as a prude, or a killjoy, when he is not filling a role—if somewhat shrilly—as
a needed conscience for Jack. The fun times and more shallow comedy tend to
“blur out” the melancholic content almost like the DP’s filtering or lens-flare
shots add a sort of vague delightfulness to the shots while making them not
entirely incisive. The one point where a fair amount of Payne-style justice is
given to the melancholic-male theme is when Miles, at the double-date
restaurant scene, has gotten rather drunk on all the glasses of the various
wines he had, and heads on uneven feet but with solid drive to a payphone and
talks to his ex-wife about how she has gotten remarried, which is OK…but it
means Miles thus won’t be at Jack’s wedding.
The editing of this sequence—including
having dial tone and phone ringing sounds happen before Miles has gotten to the
phone (as if the sounds mean he’s obsessing about making the call)—with his
rather sickish face at the phone, in partial shots, and his stumbling, rather-slurred
talk, and muted music: it all is a nice way to show a relatable
tipsy/melancholic moment when Miles is trying to get some control over his
emotions, not yet settled, regarding his ex-wife. (His ex-wife, sensibly on her
part, is uncomfortable about the call and wants to hang up.) It’s at moments
like this when, even if we agree Miles can be peevish and self-involved, we
still feel for him in his suffering, even if it’s displayed among a double date
that seems delightful to the others.
I took a fair amount of notes on
this film (I had to take out two DVDs, one from each of two libraries, because
one was so badly damaged, making for skips that missed a lot of a couple
scenes, that I had to have the other to see the scenes where the skips had
been), but I meant this review to be short.
As you might expect, from this
pleasantly photo’d movie (with nice, jaunty music by Rolfe Kent, including
interspliced samples of hit songs [not by him] for situational spice), with its sharply
drawn comedy and economical scenes, Jack’s agenda eventually becomes known to
Stephanie—who understandably goes ballistic on him, having found she was only
to be his rollicking fling before he got married in a few short days. (The film’s
comedy is such that at one point Jack even thinks he is so much in love with
Stephanie that he will abandon the upcoming wedding, take up with Steph, move
to this area, and have a business partnership with Miles in a vineyard.)
A final fling shows how bad the hi-jinks can get
Jack isn’t through with his
16-year-old’s drive. In a bawdily comic film like this, for there to be a real
dramatic arc featuring someone learning something but good, things—as in some Coens films, for example—can go from
the “broad-comic sublime” to the “ridiculously downturning yet darkly comic.”
Jack is going to have a date
with a waitress at yet another restaurant the two men have dined at. Miles
starts to remonstrate with him. Jack, cogently enough for someone of his speed,
points out that Miles—who knows all about literature, movies, and wine—doesn’t
understand Jack’s “plight.”
Then Jack really does encounter a
plight, though not one he expected. Banging on the motel door. Miles, groggy,
goes to answer. Jack is there, ludicrously naked, and cold. Gets hastily under
a blanket. Jack asks, Where’s the Vicodin? It turned out the waitress’s husband
worked the night shift and came home and found his wife with Jack. Jack walked
several miles, naked, on a cold night, at one point through an ostrich farm,
whose inhabitants weren’t entirely friendly.
One problem: Jack left his
wallet at the woman’s house. No problem, says Miles; we can cancel his credit
cards, etc. But no, Jack insists: the wedding rings, so hard to pick out, are
in the wallet. Jack bawls like a baby when he assures Miles he can’t lose Christine, his fiancee.
They go back to the waitress’s
house, at about dawn. After they have some conversational tussle in the car, it is Miles
who will sneak into the house and retrieve the wallet for his old friend. Miles
cat-burglars into the rather tawdry house, and finds that in a cluttered
bedroom, with some country honk sounding to me like Rick Derringer roaring on
the stereo, the waitress and her husband are doing the nasty on a bed. The
wallet is on a dresser just beyond them (and look, there are George W. Bush and
Donald Rumsfeld on TV, just beyond the rather obscene sex act in progress).
Miles hustles in like a smash-and-grab thief, races out of the house. The
husband, bollock-naked (and with not
the pleasantest of bodies) runs out after him. Miles just about gets into his
car, slamming the door closed, as the furious husband bumps up against it like
a fat-sac, non-CGI vision from hell. The Saab heads off in the growing morning
light.
A test of friendship doesn’t get
any tougher than this, when it involves a sort of stop in a lower-middle-class Hades.
A restoration of seriousness comes with promise
At the wedding, as Jack is amid
taking his vows, he gives Miles a secret appreciative/wiseass look, as if to
remember the frat-boy good times they’d just had.
In almost a story coda, Miles
ends up getting an interested-in-you phone call from Maya, who had also parted
ways angrily with Miles for a time, following the revelation about the purpose
of their trip. But before that, he had given her a copy of his novel
manuscript, what looks like 2,000 pages in two stationery boxes. She leaves
words for him that, we can assess, seem like maybe he has a new mate in his future
too.
This film has many nice moments,
if you like this kind of accessible, often broad-humor fun. It is Payne’s most
animal-instinct story of despair—if, looking on Maslow’s hierarchy of
needs, you wanted characters operating often on the lowest level, on the level
of animal appetites, rather than those given more to struggles concerning the
higher emotions, more complex concerns of “profane” life, and more
religiously-aimed questions.
Payne’s new film Nebraska
is being released this month, November. I hope the critics remember that he did
more than just Sideways.
End note.
This does not include me. I said "some of us" to be courteous, and as not to say something like "There are shiftless slobs who...." Anyway, I myself was not in a fraternity, and from what I remember of them from college, members were more interested in drinking than in seeking out one night stands or such.
End note.
This does not include me. I said "some of us" to be courteous, and as not to say something like "There are shiftless slobs who...." Anyway, I myself was not in a fraternity, and from what I remember of them from college, members were more interested in drinking than in seeking out one night stands or such.
