Overall Rating
  Awesome: 65.02%
Worth A Look: 18.72%
Average: 7.39%
Pretty Bad: 3.94%
Total Crap: 4.93%
17 reviews, 101 user ratings
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| Sideways |
by Robert Flaxman
"Payne's getting closer, but he's not there yet."
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Alexander Payne's new film Sideways is, if nothing else, aptly-titled. Lead character Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti) is at a point in his life where things aren't getting any better for him, but they really aren't getting any worse either (possibly because they can't). As a result, Miles spends the whole movie moving not up or down but - wait for it - sideways. The same could be said for the film as a whole, which never manages to take off but also never does anything bad enough to completely sink.With films like Election and About Schmidt, Payne has long since established himself as someone in the darkly comedic underbelly of human nature. His protagonists are certainly not always the most likable - Election's Jim McAllister cheats on his wife and plots the downfall of a perky candidate for school president, while Warren Schmidt mopes about after his wife's death and tries to stop his daughter's wedding to a man of whom he disapproves. Payne never seems to be looking for sympathy for his characters in these films, save perhaps for Schmidt's final scene. If that's the case, he seems to have broken out of his mold with Sideways.
Not that Miles is always the most sympathetic character, of course - very early in the film he stops by his mother's house and "borrows" several hundred dollars from a hidden safe box. He's also a drunk, which he covers up by maintaining the outward appearance of a wine expert. He manages to come across better than he might otherwise, though, because Payne provides him with a foil in Jack (Thomas Haden Church), his old college roommate. Miles and Jack get together to spend a week in wine country before Jack gets married, and they're pretty much the Odd Couple. Miles is serious and depressed, while Jack is essentially a big frat boy - so even as we see Miles as being too heavy, Jack's semi-caricature of a characterization makes us sympathetic to Miles for having to endure what feels like a major annoyance.
The characterizations of Miles and Jack, and of the women they meet on the trip, Maya (Virginia Madsen) and Stephanie (Sandra Oh), are pretty strong, but Payne spends far more time doting on them than he needs to - combined with a pretty thin plot, the film would be fine as a character piece if it weren't so long, but at more than two hours there are times when it plods. It doesn't approach the deadly slow pace of About Schmidt, fortunately, but there is rarely a whole lot going on.
Jack and Stephanie shack up, while Miles and Maya endure a hesitant courtship. This goes on for a while, and then Miles and Maya finally get together, at which point Miles ruins everything by revealing that Jack is to be married that weekend (a fact Jack had conveniently neglected to mention). Once the main narrative concludes around that point, Payne has to wind things to a close - most of what comes near the film's end feels tacked on to provide a few more awkward laughs, though, rather than adding to the theme.
There's a great moment with maybe five minutes left involving Miles and an expensive bottle of wine that is a sublime payoff to an earlier part of the film, but it would be much better if the film gave a sense of having earned this moment. It's still the smartest, most heartbreaking moment in the film, but it needed the film around it to lend a bit more to Miles' character than it did.
Payne has always seemed very interested in life's little details - he doesn't want to just make a film that's about its story or even just about its characters. He wants the context. It's why we know what Warren Schmidt orders at Dairy Queen, and it's why most of Sideways is what it is. Context isn't necessarily a bad thing, but here it sprawls, telling us too much about the characters even as their personal traits don't really tell us enough. The characters feel fleshed out, but in some respects we're just getting the same things over and over again, presented perhaps in a slightly different way each time.
The acting is good, at least. Giamatti is unsurprisingly fantastic; with American Splendor he proved he can carry a smaller film and transcend more mundane material, and he does it again here. Haden Church, Madsen, and Oh are all good in the surrounding roles, but the show here is Giamatti's, eliciting all possible sympathy for a man who doesn't seem interested in drawing any. If there's an actor out there today who can better convey the sense of a disappointing life that Giamatti wears throughout the film, I can't think of him. It's a pitch-perfect turn in a tailor-made role.
Giamatti, along with the dialogue of Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor, makes the film watchable. The narrative itself is far weaker; it's understandable why Payne wouldn't want to shorten things up, because the actual dialogue is frequently great, but this movie just isn't one where some great dialogue can take the place of a real story - and anyway, the dialogue isn't that great, just relatively funny. This film needed to be shorter - or, failing that, it needed to have a better plot.Payne and Taylor do a good job of capturing how people interact, but they've yet to do a good job making that interaction worth caring about. This is their best-written film yet on both of those counts, but the latter still needs work. Payne wants to tap into human drama, but he's still working his way towards characters on whom the audience's emotions aren't mostly wasted.
link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=10451&reviewer=385
originally posted: 11/17/04 21:22:38
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Chicago Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Chicago Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Starz Denver Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Starz Denver Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 Toronto Film Festival. For more in the 2004 Toronto Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2004 New York Film Festival. For more in the 2004 New York Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
22-Oct-2004 (R)
DVD: 05-Apr-2005
UK
N/A
Australia
26-Jan-2005
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