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| Tookey's Review |
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| Cast |
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| Released: |
2004 |
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| Genre: |
DRAMA
ROMANCE
COMEDY
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
124 |
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Overpraised but enjoyable road movie.
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Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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Sideways is a small movie with a huge reputation. It’s just been Oscar-nominated for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay, for which it’s already won a Golden Globe. Although its leading actor, Paul Giamatti (pictured left), has been overlooked in the Best Actor category, his co-stars Thomas Haden Church (pictured right) and Virginia Madsen have both been nominated for supporting roles.
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It’s three kinds of picture in one. It’s a road movie, about two middle-aged friends, Miles (Giamatti) and Jack (Church), on a wine-tasting trip around California’s Santa Ynez valley, a week before Jack’s wedding.
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It’s also a buddy-buddy movie, with the two men who used to be friends at college discovering that in middle age they have become virtually opposites, an Odd Couple at large. Miles is a paunchy, disenchanted teacher, an unpublished and probably unpublishable author, an inveterate wine snob, and a romantic disaster-area, still wallowing in self-pity two years after his wife walked out on him.
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Jack (Thomas Haden Church) is in better shape physically, but a washed-up TV soap actor with no knowledge of wine - just a lively interest in getting drunk, no scruples about loving and leaving women, and a determination to get laid before settling down to respectable domesticity.
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The humour arises from the two friends’ dawning realisation that the other is a social embarrassment, and that they have almost nothing in common, except failure. Miles rebukes Jack for chewing gum at a wine-tasting and regards Jack’s womanising is a sign that he lacks Miles’s emotional maturity.
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Jack may not know bad wine from good, but doesn’t care. His principal concern is that, when they go for a night out with two women they don’t know, Miles mustn't ruin Jack’s prospects of free, meaningless sex. “You’ve been officially depressed for, like, eight years,” Jack complains. “I don’t want you passing out or going to the dark side.”
Sideways is least convincing as a romantic comedy. It’s hard to feel that Jack is really cut out for marriage, or even a serious relationship, so his side of the romantic shenanigans is basically an excuse for some disappointingly crude, knockabout humour which borders on gross-out. We may laugh, but we never care what happens to him.
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Virginia Madsen turns in an engaging performance as a lovely waitress and wine buff who sees past Miles’s unpromising exterior and, frankly, not much more promising interior, to see the nice guy allegedly deep beneath. I didn’t quite believe in her. She seems a little too much like a fantasy woman, and Miles doesn’t do enough to deserve her.
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The picture will appeal especially to depressives, for it tells them that all may be well in the end, with little or no effort required to change. A lot of critics tend to be depressives, which may be one reason why this film has achieved the extravagant praise that it has.
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Did I enjoy Sideways? Yes, for its two leading characters, who are observed with great freshness and humanity in Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor’s screenplay, based on a novel by Rex Pickett. There are a lot of perceptive observations about middle-aged self-deception, a few very funny scenes, and some laugh-out-loud lines of dialogue, as when Miles, after a day of wine tasting, phones his ex-wife out of lonely desperation, and Jack rolls his eyes with an “Oh, no!” expression and asks: "Did you drink and dial?"
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There’s also quite a clever, extended use of wine metaphor. Miles unconsciously identifies with grapes of the subtle, Pinot variety - he calls them thin-skinned, temperamental and in need of constant care and attention - while Jack is a more upfront, unsubtle Chardonnay.
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The story drags in its middle section – most road movies are rambling, episodic and unstructured, and this one’s no exception. Nor does it have much to say about the relationship between the sexes, except that it is (apparently) the woman’s role to be endlessly tolerant and supportive.
Alexander Payne’s two previous tragi-comedies, Election and About Schmidt, were two of the outstanding pictures of the past decade. Sideways is neater, but less ambitious in scope – like its leading man, it’s a bit too flabby round the middle. You’ll enjoy it most if you don’t expect a masterpiece. This is a pleasant little film, with a rather over-inflated reputation.
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Jack: Thomas Haden Church 
. Based on the novel by Rex Pickett