THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
January 28, 2005, Friday

On a road trip to an Oscar Review Witty and brilliantly acted, with
endearingly offbeat characters, this odd couple odyssey deserves to
be named Best Film

BY Sukhdev Sandhu

Sideways

15 cert, 127 min

At last – Sideways. Alexander Payne’s slanted and enchanted follow-up
to About Schmidt is utter joy, pure 100 per cent-proof bliss, the
most laugh-out-loud funny film to come out of America in years. It’s
a Last of the Summer Wine for grown-ups, a road movie of impeccably
slack structure, effervescent but with a strong bouquet of melancholy
and more than a faint trace of bawdy. Never thought you’d see a
comedy that used Pinot as a metaphor for all that is, or could be,
good about the human spirit? This, most assuredly, is it. Million
Dollar Baby and The Aviator be damned; this, if there’s any justice
in the world, should walk away with the Oscar for Best Picture.

Adapted by Payne and fellow-screenwriter Jim Taylor from a novel by
Rex Pickett, Sideways is the story of an odd couple – Miles (Paul
Giamatti), a middle-school literature teacher who has yet to recover
from a divorce two years previously and is struggling to find a
publisher for his 700-page novel, and his college roommate Jack
(Thomas Haden Church), a former soap star and commercial voiceover
artist – who go on a driving tour of the vineyards of Santa Barbara.

For Miles the trip is a chance to catch up, to have a mellow
golf-and-Grigio vacation. For Jack, a priapic goat at the best of
times, it’s a final hurrah, a chance to get his end away before he
gets married in a week’s time. The former is in a state of low-grade
depression and thinks of himself as a “thumbprint on the window of a
skyscraper”; the latter, louche and carefree, decides to act as his
feel-good therapist – the chief remedy he proposes being that he
should get his rocks off too.

They’re a double act, then. Straight man and funny man. Except that
Payne is too subtle to leave it at that. Miles, it turns out, is more
than a lovable loser: he cheated on his wife and steals from his
mother’s dresser.

Jack, for all that he comes across as an easy-riding knucklehead, can
pull out of his hat winning quotes from John Kennedy Toole novels. As
they clock up the road miles, they find themselves constantly
switching roles: each serves time as a sulker, helping hand,
emotional goad.

Theirs is the real on-off, affectionate/exasperated love affair in
this film, a relationship based on an intimate knowledge and
acceptance of each other’s flaws. But they both strike gold with two
women: Miles finds solace, though his knock-kneed timidity means he
nearly scuppers this chance, with divorced waitress Maya (Virginia
Madsen); Jack hooks up with single-mother Stephanie (Sandra Oh).

It’s rare to find yourself caring about pretty much every character
in a film. Miles and Jack are flawed, fools sometimes, but probably
no more so than we ourselves are. Giamatti has the most beautifully
glass-half-empty kind of face in American movies today. With his
bloodshot eyes, his pale doughy cheeks that scream out “Hit me! I’m a
loser!”, and his gait that resembles a crippled dog, he makes other
nabobs of sob such as Philip Seymour Hoffman and William Macy look
like classroom clowns.

Payne is unusual for the time he spends lingering on actors’ faces:
Jack’s winking, rubber-lipped Jaggerisms; Stephanie’s penetrating
gaze that’s as testing as it is a seduction; the secret sorrows,
trust, fundamental optimism of soul that we divine whenever Maya
smiles. What layers of unspoken history and biography can be revealed
by directors who dare to keep the camera still.

I’m stressing the more autumnal, pensive elements of Sideways but,
first and foremost, it’s an absolute hoot. Haden Church could make
the Yellow Pages sound hilarious. His denunciation of Miles’s “morose
comedown bullshit” is pure poetry. As for the scenes in which Miles,
commando-style, enters the home of one of Jack’s one-night-stands to
retrieve the wallet left behind when the woman’s tattooed husband
returned, make sure you’re sitting upright so that you don’t die
choking with laughter.

Payne is sometimes mentioned in the same breath as a clutch of
twenty- and thirtysomething directors – Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson and
David O Russell among them – whose films, for all their wit and
visual flair, are too often arch and ironic, shuffling between high
theory and pop culture with a zany ostentation that can grate. Payne,
I think, is closer in sensibility to someone like Richard Linklater.
And, like that director’s 2004 masterpiece Before Sunset, Sideways is
above all a triumph of space and time.

It doesn’t hop or jerk or trade in grabby spectacles. Rather, it
unfurls and unwinds gently, like an especially good vintage, its two
hours passing by in an instant but leaving us with an intense feeling
of how quickly human beings can move from youth to maturity to old
age.

About Schmidt pulled in many plaudits, but for me it was a
half-cocked affair that relied too heavily on Jack Nicholson’s
petrified talents and, as a consequence, seemed rather knowing and
smug. This is a far gentler work.

I sense, and certainly hope, that Payne is trying to craft a new kind
of humanist film-making, one whose landscapes, emotional as well as
physical, are all too rarely presented to moviegoers these days.

The America he offers us is a smiling, tacitly inclusive place. Not
that any of the characters mentions or is even surprised by it, but
it’s striking that Stephanie is the half-Chinese daughter of a white
mother and is herself the mother of a half-black daughter. Jack,
who’s about to get married to an Armenian anyway, doesn’t even raise
an eyebrow at this and loves playing with the kid.

Through a windscreen blearily, we see Jack and Miles travel past hazy
vineyards and blue remembered hills. One gorgeous scene, a long-range
snapshot of human happiness perhaps, shows the two picnicking couples
laughing away and sipping wine while sprawled out in a field with the
sun going down behind them. Southern California has rarely looked as
good as this on screen. Nor sounded as good: Rolfe Kent has fashioned
a charmingly low-key jazz score that drifts, gambols and puckers up
in perfect harmony with the ebb and flow of the men’s emotional
fortunes.

I could go on and on about Sideways. Brilliantly acted, cannily paced
and immaculate in rhythm and tone, I wish it had gone on indefinitely
too. That said, it has an ending as exquisite as that of The Office
Christmas special. Make sure you see it. Then make sure you see it
again. Like good wine, it improves with age.