NYFF COVERAGE – Miles may be a loser, but he is also a wine snob. A lonely public school English teacher with a few unpublished novels and an ex-wife he still pines for, he can still tell the difference between a pinot and a cabernet, sniff the bouquet correctly, and tell you about the oak barrels. For Miles, a wine makes more sense than real life: if the grapes are given the constant care and attention they demand, the peaks and declines of a wine’s life will be more or less predictable.
Jack, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. Charming, gregarious, overconfident, and oversexed, he is a TV soap opera and voiceover actor who never fails to impress with his impromptu recitations of APR financing information and prescription drug side effects. Together, the two old friends embark on a week of wine, debauchery, and bile in the lovely Santa Ynez Valley, California, for one last week of “cutting loose” before Jack’s wedding. But naturally, with Miles’ manic depression and Jack’s need to sew his wild oats, circumstances go horribly awry, and each man is confronted with his own weakness and morbid self-absorption.
The fourth feature film from director Alexander Payne, Sideways, is as brutally incisive as it is hilarious. A relentless and painfully funny critique of masculine pretense and selfishness (of which wine fetishism is the apotheosis), Payne’s film never fails to turn a comic situation into a tragic one, and vice versa. His characters lurch and stumble toward self-discovery, revealing the pathos and absurdity of their childish sexual and emotional needs.
This mixture of comedy and tragedy is encapsulated by the performance of Paul Giamatti as the almost farcically miserable Miles. Reticent, pessimistic, and completely ensconced in his own problems, he is content only when he is wallowing in his own lack of success with writing, women, and money. Like Payne’s other stuffy schoolteacher, Matthew Broderick’s character in Election, Miles is someone to whom the whole world – and particularly his own needs and desires – seems a cruel joke. What distinguishes Sideways from Payne’s previous collaborations with screenwriter Jim Taylor is that it allows its characters a small glimpse of optimism, in keeping with the film’s slightly sunnier tone. The steady accumulation of his literary failures, his attachment to his ex-wife, and his difficulties in courting a beautiful woman brings about a resolution that, while not at all triumphant, suggests that Miles’ crippling petulance will be overcome.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Fox Searchlight Pictures 35mm print
16 Oct 2004 10:46 PM | Submit Comment