Sideways (2004)
Directed by Alexander Payne
Two middle-aged men embark on a spiritual journey through Californian wine country. One is an unpublished novelist suffering from depression, and the other is only days away from walking down the aisle.
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What critics say influenced Sideways
There are very few films in this day and age that both harkens back to the tradition of “Five Easy Pieces” exploring characters with no real future or anything to look forward to, and searching for one, while exploring the incredulously distressing and often futile machinations in the artistic experience of an author.
Recently divorced alcoholic schoolteacher and aspiring novelist Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti, "American Splendor") uses his best buddy Jack's (Thomas Haden Church, TV's "Wings" and "Ned and Stacy") impending marriage for a week long male bonding trip to central California wine country.
Paul Giamatti, the pudgy, balding, slightly despondent character actor of Man on the Moon and American Splendor, gives a performance of such pent-up desperation and heartbreaking moroseness in Sideways that he single-handedly cements Alexander Payne's film as one of the year's finest.
He's also coaxed great performances out of four lesser-known actors and transformed one of them, Paul Giamatti from "American Splendor," into film's most unlikely leading man.
Giamatti, a virtuoso of nervous self-loathing (witness his performance as Harvey Pekar in "American Splendor"), interacts with Church impeccably, and their friendship seems at once believable and too funny to be believed.
Whatever the case, after already lengthy careers, Paul Giamatti ( American Splendor ), Thomas Haden Church ( Tombstone ) and Virgina Madsen ( Crossfire Trail ) all give the best performances of their lives in Sideways, the new film from writer-director Alexander Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor, the team responsible for Election and About Schmidt .
Payne is so adept at mining quiet humor ("swinging bachelors" watch The Grapes of Wrath in their hotel room) that we buy it when Sideways almost turns farcical in the late going, because we've already invested in the characters.
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).
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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.)
He garnered sympathy as Howard Stern’s put upon producer, Kenny Pig Vomit’ Rushton, in “Private Parts,” and stole the show as the conniving, arrogant filmmaker, Marty Wolf, in “Big Fat Liar.”
¢ Paul Giamatti, an overweight, balding character actor who, until last year's "American Splendor," was best known as "Pig Vomit" in Howard Stern's "Private Parts."
His sophomore effort, “Election,” and third film, “About Schmidt,” showed that the writer/director is far more than a one-shot wonder.
Alexander Payne, the director of Citizen Ruth, Election, and About Schmidt, has returned with his best film to date, Sideways, a brilliant revival of that most disreputable of genres, the buddy movie.
Sideways, directed by the incisive Alexander Payne (Election, Citizen Ruth), follows Miles and his old college buddy Jack (Thomas Haden Church), a has-been soap actor, on a week's vacation through the well-lit banality of California.
His follow-up, Election, was one of the darkest, most accurate and hysterical high school comedies ever made.
Now that Alexander Payne has made four films ("Citizen Ruth," "Election," "About Schmidt" and the new "Sideways") that have all been excellent, we can officially declare him one of the best directors currently working.
Whatever the case, after already lengthy careers, Paul Giamatti ( American Splendor ), Thomas Haden Church ( Tombstone ) and Virgina Madsen ( Crossfire Trail ) all give the best performances of their lives in Sideways, the new film from writer-director Alexander Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor, the team responsible for Election and About Schmidt .
(Maybe Vincent D'Onofrio, as he was in The Whole Wide World, or the unconventionally fiery Peter Sarsgaard?)
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Inasmuch as Miles is the smaller and brighter of the two men and Jack is the bigger and more brainless, they reminded me a good deal of George and Lennie in John Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men," with Miles continually having to get Jack out of trouble.
Payne shares with the great Billy Wilder ("Some Like It Hot," "The Apartment") the knack for heightening scene after scene with the addition of a few little details that most directors might overlook or leave behind in the editing room.