Friday, November 8, 2013

Movie break (Quick Vu): Yutzing around in California wine country: Sideways (2004)



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.