Alexander Payne had been working toward Sideways throughout his previous three pictures – Citizen Ruth, Election and About Schmidt – all of which alternated moments of well-oiled SNL caricature with messier, more tender, more ambiguous bits and pieces of uncertainty and longing. Payne is up to the same thing in all pictures, and his aim is so (sadly) unusual and admirable that I admit that I’m tempted to overrate him for intentions alone: he’s interested in making mainstream comedies populated by actual people; that are embraceable by all audiences without making impersonal concessions. Payne has been compared to Sturges, but that strikes me more as writers wanting readers to know they’re familiar with Preston Sturges. Payne’s heart is clearly at least partially in the 1970s (thankfully he doesn’t shamelessly ape 1970s aesthetics, one of the more dispiriting trends in acclaimed American movies these days), and a clear inspiration is Hal Ashby. Sideways is bathed in the sort of ironically gorgeous heartsick lighting that characterized Shampoo; and Payne also has an Ashby way of wringing a slightly different juice out of stock moments.
Sideways is, obviously, a buddy movie, one of those pictures where the horny guy and the nerd go on a road trip, and the horny guy rides the nerd for not getting laid as an excuse to rub the nerd in his own masculinity and indulge his own appetites. Paul Giamatti is, of course, the nerd, and he has a body language that tells us most of Miles’ story at first glance. The picture has a wonderful opening: we hear knocking on a door over a black screen, Miles, asleep, asks who it is, it’s a construction worker, and Miles’ hung-over exasperation – he’s suffered a mild defeat ten seconds into the day – tells us everything. Every episode in Miles’ life is a chore at best, an affront at worst, and he’s a serially depressed pill in desperate need of the kind of broken, approachable angel with which all desperate, depressed pills find themselves dreaming. Miles’ buddy, Jack (Thomas Haden Church) is aging relatively gracefully – he’s edgy and a little haggard in a fairly sexy way, his confidence is somewhat unjustified (he’s far too eager, and we see that in the way he fumbles and stretches his stunned “yeah” when a woman returns his interest) but we get why he’s does as well as he seems to do.
Payne tends to over-telegraph actors’ body language, but it’s refreshing to see a director working in the mainstream who even values body language – he’s staging little wars in his actors’ gestures. The moment where Miles and Maya (Virginia Madsen) discuss wine, with Miles giving her his autobiography through pinot noir grapes, is widely and justifiably quoted, but the more revealing moment comes right before that exchange: sitting on a couch, hearing Jack and Maya’s friend have loud sex, they flirt, not with one another exactly, but with whether this is a good idea. Giamatti’s posture – awful, squashed into the couch as asexually as presumably possible – is so madly right for this situation it would be worth seeing the picture for alone; and Madsen, who is playing a bit of an idealization (quiet, smart, kind, tolerant, shy, attractive, available) is just as good, her positioning is open, perhaps to a fault, she’s daring this dweeb to take a hint. (Compare this with Miles and Maya’s language together once they’ve had sex and grown more comfortable: lounging separately-yet-together reading and doing crosswords in the sun and grass.)
Miles’ inability to take a hint, is, once the sex and weddings and pining and alcohol have been pared away, the real drive of the movie. The picture ends (perfectly) with a different kind of knock on a door, perfect, not because we’re supposed to take that he and Maya will permanently wind up together (we doubt it), but because Miles has come to a point in his life in which he’s willing to open himself up – to take a damn hint.
Sideways is free of the cartoons of About Schmidt (which had lovely moments) – this picture has maybe ten scenes as memorable as Schmidt’s awkward trailer come-on, or his wedding speech, or his heartbreaking catharsis at the end. Church’s breakdown in the motel toward the end didn’t initially work for me, I thought it was false, but on re-watching it is clear that it’s supposed to be false – the work of a self-absorbed wannabe actor trying to get his bobble back. One thing many people have overlooked in Sideways is Jack’s own mid-life terror, which is every bit as intense and self-destructive as Miles’, only channeled differently.
Payne’s problem? He needs to relax his staging, which means he needs to be more prolific. You feel Payne, in the vineyard montages, wanting to cut loose from the very precise, clear blocking – you sense him wanting to get messy. Payne’s pictures, as wonderful as long stretches are, strike me as a tad too careful – you know he’s an intelligent man who knows the mechanics of making a movie that will be at least moderately well-received. Payne is capable of certain Ashby moments – such as most anything in Harold and Maude – but he hasn’t shown himself to be capable yet of making something as volatile as The Landlord. And you can tell he wants to – I’ve read interviews with Payne saying that he wants to start a script with no prescribed source or structure and see where it takes him. He wants, and needs, to knock on the door.
