Movie Review
Sideways
The writer-director Alexander Payne and his co-scenarist Jim Taylor are career ironists, drawn by disposition to tells stories not about the usual romanticized heroes and heroines but about protagonists who represent various low-slung estimates of humankind. Their first two movies,
Citizen Ruth (1996) and
Election (1999), go in for total satire, in which the wrongheaded characters crash into each other like bumper cars--they can't reach their goals or understand why that is. As a result,
the usual Hollywood salesmanship that works first and foremost by making you like the characters at all costs never comes into play because the characters' every fantasy, delusion, or outright lie stands out in high relief. To us but not, of course, to them. When the irredeemable title figure scampers off with a bag of money at the end of
Citizen Ruth we've had such an unidealized view of her that although we're amazed we feel no urge to cheer. (Unthinkable in Hollywood product like
The Italian Job.)
With
About Schmidt (2002), in which the protagonist develops a need for consoling revelation so late in life that his habit of living has put it beyond his reach, Payne and Taylor open the irony up a bit. Unlike the relentless, bunker-busting irony of
Citizen Ruth and
Election, the movie's cruel-funny detachment pauses at the climactic wedding party when Schmidt stands to make a speech. We know he's hoping to save his daughter from a bad marriage but we see both that he isn't capable of forcing a big moment on an unexpecting crowd and that even if he were he wouldn't know what to say. The movie's proportion of irony to agony mirrors the proportion of blindness to insight in Schmidt's life: you laugh, laugh, laugh through the movie, almost as if you were staving off awareness of what it feels like to be without emotional or spiritual resources, but then it can't be put off anymore. That last scene hit me like a sudden intake of icy air.
It was as if I'd awakened mid-flight to find that I'd only dreamed the airplane but was nonetheless six miles off the ground.
In Payne and Taylor's new release
Sideways, the irony and realism inform each other in an ongoing way new for them.
The story unfolds as a realistic recreation of a highly individual road trip: Jack (
Thomas Haden Church), an aging, no-longer-successful TV actor, is about to get married to the daughter of a booming immigrant businessman, and so Miles (
Paul Giamatti), his old college buddy and now a middle-school English teacher and serious but unpublished novelist, takes him off for a last-week-of-freedom in the
Santa Barbara wine country.
The irony does its work by preventing their picaresque adventures from being too familiarly cozy. The soft realism of most character-driven movies leads you to expect that Jack and Miles will come to terms with their disappointments as they peak into middle age and that in the process Jack will either decide not to marry his uptight girlfriend or will be confirmed in his love. What you get instead is an ironic remove from the characters in which you aren't gratified by seeing them grow out of their characters to become normal, healthy, and happy (terms generally arrived at by some vague romantic-liberal consensus).
As Payne says in
this interview with
Dark Horizons,
he's interested in the "closer relationship between real reality and movie reality, where the stories [a]re more generally life-like,
with real human characters, ambiguous endings," that were introduced into American movies in the late '60s and '70s. There's no wish-fulfillment here. Jack and Miles make a fascinatingly immature pair--Jack looking like an oversized boy and Miles showing that "ruin of youth which is not like age" (Dickens's description of Richard Carstone toward the end of
Bleak House)--from beginning to end.
Having the characters stay insistently true to type is also one of the classic means of comedy, and Sideways is nothing if not funny. Jack is a narcissist past his prime who just wants to get laid but who, after a few steamy nights with Stephanie (
Sandra Oh), a frisky pourer at a winery, thinks he loves her more than his fiancée. That's certainly what he tells Stephanie at any rate. Jack, however, is incapable of focusing on the possible consequences of his betrayal and deceit, or even of holding the bad consequences that have already happened in his mind. Stephanie's angry reaction when she finds out about his pending marriage doesn't keep him from picking up another goer, who recognizes him from TV despite the bandage on his nose, but whose husband gets home from work an hour earlier than she expected.
A mechanically predictable character can also stir pathos, which isn't necessarily inconsistent with comedy. Miles, for his part, is paralyzed by self-pity that has turned to self-loathing. He's a keen and fluent wine connoisseur, but at the end of the day he's using fine wine the way a derelict uses Thunderbird. It's amazing how even his verbal facility at describing the bouquet of wine, which we initially admire, serves to keep people at bay. Stephanie is friends with Maya (
Virginia Madsen), a waitress who knows Miles from his regular visits to the area, shares his love of wine, and who is drawn to him, and so the two couples go out for dinner. Back at Stephanie's house, while the other couple is loudly fucking, Miles keeps missing his own jump-off point with Maya and keeps talking about wine.
When Maya asks him why he's so interested in pinot noir grapes, and he answers--because of their thin-skinned hypersensitivity and the resultant difficulty of cultivating them--it's painfully clear he's talking about himself. And when Maya tries to turn the morose conversation around with her vision of wine as a way to enjoy the very evanescence of life, we know Miles is too stuck in his self-protecting preoccupations to
hear what she's saying. (In this scene Miles is reminiscent of John Marcher missing May Bartram's point in
Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle," and this comment from James's climax could equally express Miles's blend of self-aggrandizement and self-deprecation: "The fate he had been marked for he had met with a vengeance–
he had emptied the cup to the lees; he had been the man of his time, THE man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened.")
Miles is heading faster and harder, and alone, down the same dead-end road as Schmidt. In the time covered by the movie, however, he's younger than Schmidt and so there's more drama in his story.
He certainly inspires Payne to some of his finest moviemaking. Miles's drunken phone call to his ex-wife (in the middle of the double date) is spectacular, blurry and yet dramatically precise. And toward the end of the movie, after Jack's deception of Stephanie has alienated Maya from Miles, his self-destructive gesture of drinking his prize bottle out of a styrofoam cup at a burger joint seems almost magically to compound two perspectives: Miles's subjective theatricality in throwing his life away and an objective view of the isolation for which, and with which, he punishes himself. (It brought me up short in the same way as the wedding party scene in
About Schmidt.)
These are stunning moments because the irony doesn't cut you off from emotion. Rather, these scenes respect the movie's commitment to irony as a way of approaching the habits of living that cut
Miles off from emotion. You can thus sorrow for Miles without feeling as if the movie expected you to share his self-pity (at the same time that you can still make out the formal traces of comic caricature in Miles's being so woefully predictable).
Virginia Madsen has to embody the possibility of unblocked connection, for Miles and for the movie, and she does it without going symbolic or hinting at self-congratulation. (For contrast, think of Glenn Close in
The Natural.) The movie is thus like a tightrope strung between Madsen and Thomas Haden Church whose work as Jack is equally impressive and even more rousing.
Displaying no narcissism himself, Church gets inside the tightly smiling desperation of an accidentally successful golden boy like Ryan O'Neal. You never imagine Jack as an interesting actor (his big moment was as a soap opera star; now he does commercial voice-overs), you think of him mainly in terms of the west coast beach-and-sun lifestyle (and its weirdly anxious indolence). But by his very shallowness Jack is more dependable than the volatile Miles, with his habit of showing up late, sulking, getting too drunk. It also makes Jack better company than Miles and not just for bogus reasons: he wants you to have a good time because then he's more likely to have a good time. (Jack's limitation is in not being able to keep anything else in life in view.)
Church is as hilariously single-minded in a SoCal way as Lisa Kudrow in Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, so that even Jack's loyalty to Miles co-exists easily with his adolescent self-indulgence--he's as determined to get Miles's "bone smooched" as he is to get his own. But two disasters do finally curb Jack and so he "realizes" he is ready to settle down. (Though covering up his indiscretions still requires him to commandeer Miles's car.) Jack doesn't go back to his fiancée for a principled reason, he's scared back to her, in a pattern we have to believe will continue on into the future.
The lack of an epiphany completes Jack's character, a clown as we run across them in life, and Church's performance is like an étude played note-perfectly on a kazoo.
Paul Giamatti, a physically unprepossessing but discerning and inventive actor (especially in last year's American Splendor), makes it clear that in some alternate life Miles would be a larger character than extroverted Jack. Giamatti nails the combination of high self-esteem and lack of confidence that makes Miles's unexpressed emotions fester (not uncommon among those intellectuals and aesthetes without the narcissism and exhibitionism seemingly necessary for success), and he conveys that Miles's attachment to, and resentment of, Jack derive from the same quality of expansiveness in Jack that Miles lacks.
You have to respect Payne when he says in the Dark Horizons interview, "I could've had more money with which to make this film had I cast more famous actors but I was not interested in that," and I personally want to see actors like Giamatti in more movies like
Sideways. That is not, however, to say that I'm entirely satisfied with Giamatti in this movie.
He certainly has some wonderful comic outbursts, when he tries to drink a bottle of wine while running downhill, for instance. And he has both the cartoon energy for the irony and the subtlety for the realistic bits, but not much charisma, and I did find myself missing it. Paired with the unsinkable Church whose character keeps telling him he's a drag, a small-scale supporting actor like Giamatti in the lead role is a little enervating. (Church even gets to steal laughs from Giamatti when Jack starts picking up on Miles's wine talk, one of the movie's best casual jokes.)
To get at the crux of the problem: Since the movie's irony discounts what Miles says, at some point you have to wonder what Maya sees in him as embodied by Giamatti. A more forward actor could have given Miles more presence without altering the character's isolation. (Maybe Vincent D'Onofrio, as he was in
The Whole Wide World, or the unconventionally fiery Peter Sarsgaard?) And asking for a buzzier star isn't asking Payne to change his way of working: he cast Laura Dern in
Citizen Ruth, Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon in
Election, and Jack Nicholson in
About Schmidt. He may not realize how much he relied on them.
The fault isn't all Giamatti's: Payne and Taylor lose track of the dramatic structure underlying the tension between the two men. We have no clue what's going on in Miles's head when he spills the beans about Jack's marriage. (Though if there's meant to be some sneaky "accidental" backstabbing, Philip Seymour Hoffman, with his glinty eyes and that noxiously self-pitying drunk
Jamie Tyrone under his belt, would have been a better actor to bring it out.) Realism requires greater specificity than irony, and the details that would fill in Miles's outlines get lost here.
The tentatively hopeful ending is also a problem because it suggests the typical moviemaker's romantic fantasy: all Miles needs is the right woman. (It's a more indirect figmentary cure for addiction than you get in
Ray but equally unconvincing.) It would be more plausible to stick to the irony that shows us characters living with the messes they make.
One of the benefits of irony as it intersects with realism is that it counteracts the tendency toward romance, the tendency to let sympathetic understanding of the characters' drives turn into melodramatic justification and romantic ennoblement--i.e., The characters are right, it's the world that's wrong. Irony can guarantee a cleaner experience of emotion, which is what I think those moviemakers of the '60s and '70s that Payne rightly prizes learned from the international pantheon of master directors and brought to such pictures as
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and
Mean Streets (1973) and
Taxi Driver (1976) and the first two
Godfather movies (1972, 1974).
We may believe in the possibility of change without believing in its likelihood (short of truly immoveable impediments to our habitual behavior), and why should moviemakers blow smoke up our ass about this?
We Don't Live Here Anymore
Earlier this year
John Curran's We Don't Live Here Anymore made breathtakingly clear how irony can hone the edge of realism, irony in this instance with almost no comic release. Watching the story of two academic couples who switch partners out of a poisonous amalgam of passion, restlessness, and perversity, and who pick and then tear at the wounds this opens, you're more likely to think of irony as the form tragedy takes in the modern, secular, middle-class world. (In the first place because we don't identify with the aristocratic protagonists of classical and Renaissance tragedy or with the heroism they share with the heroes of romance. But also because irony is the cold-eyed modern way of assessing characters' actions as we assess our own once we've stopped kidding ourselves and accepted that we're responsible for our own mistakes.) The roving husbands played by
Mark Ruffalo and
Peter Krause, the dissatisfied, straying wife played by
Naomi Watts, and the wronged wife played (with fierce intensity) by
Laura Dern are hyperalert to each other but can't align their drives and actions in a straightforward way. The literary husbands who instigate the drama, who challenge each other and then observe and comment on the results, don't have any advantage over the reactive women. Nobody can get untwisted.
The script,
based on two stories by the late Andre Dubus, awakens you to the tiniest indicators of character, and Curran cuts back and forth among the characters in an offbeat, synthetic style, cementing the collage with a near-experimental use of sound. Though the actions and reactions that make up the story are flawlessly orchestrated, the editing and the soundtrack obey some non-narrative rhythm in an unprecedented way for American domestic drama. It works like a massage on your brain--
your expectations of climax, resolution, consolation fall away and you're quite simply present in every detail of every moment.
In the previous movie based on Dubus's work,
In the Bedroom (2001), the naturalistic handling couldn't overcome the melodramatic framework. You never understood the killer and so you found yourself rooting for the bereaved parents to get away with their retributive murder of him. (Hey, it kept me awake.) In
We Don't Live Here Anymore you listen to Ruffalo and Dern as husband and wife fighting and realize that although she's picked up on all his bad behavior she can't articulate her sense of just resentment. Unable to resist exploiting the power her boozy confusion gives him, he wins the arguments but without diminishing the conflict. What's important is that
we realize what's happening (and what isn't), but Dern doesn't. If she could it wouldn't be true. Dramatizing the characters' conflicts and confusions without enabling them to articulate them explicitly, cogently, and effectively is realism at its most daring.
I can't think of another American movie about relationships that is at once so heated and so objective.
In the end
Sideways makes the kind of false move that
We Don't Live Here Anymore never does, and that's probably in part why Curran's movie didn't find an audience, even with critics. (
We Don't Live Here Anymore is so far the best American movie of the year, not to be missed on its release to dvd next month, and perhaps better to watch intimately at home. And
Laura Dern, fearless as usual about following her instinct for characterization into grotesque reaches if necessary,
gives the best performance by an American actress.) But in
Sideways Payne and Taylor have attempted what is for them a stretch in blending irony and realism. Their movie disguises the difficulty but also miscarries some of the effect. All the same the critical and audience response to it strikes me as a genuine response to narrative complexity. They might be heroes if such creatures existed in their world.
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