Sideways: Movie Review (4 out of 10)
Sideways, the latest offering from Alexander Payne (director of Election, About Schmidt), captures the story of the recently divorced writer/schoolteacher Miles and his philandering manchild of a best friend Jack as they trek across northern California for a final week of celebration before Jack’s wedding. If the premise sounds a bit familiar, it’s probably because the coming-of-age road trip story has been done approximately 500 times before. This time, however, instead of teenagers learning to deal with their newfound independence while relishing in crude humor surrounded by cheap booze and plenty of nudity, the characters are learning to deal with middle age, relishing in only marginally cleaner humor surrounded by expensive wine-tasting events serving as thinly veiled disguises for alcoholism and, well… rampant nudity.
The first leg of the journey begins with womanizer/groom-to-be Jack swearing to get both him and his twitchy companion Miles laid, while Miles gets jittery and revisits his past marital problems roughly every ten minutes. From there it’s off to wine country, where the better part of the next 45 minutes is spent watching the two characters pull over into every winery they pass along the highway and getting all sorts of cinematic lectures on the fine art of wine tasting, a theme which the film grips onto with an icy fist and doesn’t let go until almost near the end. Given, this is an independent film (which this year seems to mean only that it’s not a sequel or based on a comic book), so a certain amount of artful metaphor is to be expected – but Payne injects so much wine-related metaphor into the movie that unless you’re really into wine to begin with, you’ll quickly feel like you’re being hit over the head with the same pretentious wine-talk over and over again. The height of alcohol appreciation for the average college student is drinking cheap beer out of plastic cups, so it’s hard to imagine too many viewers within the age group really enjoying the first half of the movie.
Thankfully, somewhere around the halfway point of the movie, things do begin to get interesting, if somewhat erratic. After setting its plot in motion the film does take some dramatic turns, but the drama often ends up happening in quick bursts, with every significant event happening in mere moments just to lead to another lull in the plot before rushing to pick up again a little while later. This combined with several rather explicit sex and frontal nudity scenes that ambush the audience with almost no warning or foreshadowing lead to a very strangely paced second half of the film.
To be fair, there’s a lot of good content in Sideways – there are many well-shot, well-acted scenes with some quality bits of dialogue-writing, and when all the solid parts come together it’s certainly a compelling film. But a lot of the critical praise this movie has received was on behalf of its supposedly natural, realistic dialogue which is simply hard to see in many parts of the film. There were plenty of good moments, yes, but there were also several jarring scenes that seemed forced and overacted; the best example of which occurred when Miles and Typical Love Interest Mya spend an evening nervously making small talk then all of a sudden start staring into each others’ eyes, holding hands and pouring their souls out to each other in dual monologues on command as if somewhere, someone rang a magical bell of Character Development.
In the end it’s not so much that Sideways is bad – while it’s far from being the pinnacle of cinema that many critics have made it out to be, it’s also just as far from being completely worthless – but Payne may have picked too narrow a target audience this time around; making a movie about wine-loving middle-aged adults appealing to a broad audience is difficult to do, and Payne didn’t succeed this time around. If you’re a big fan of Payne’s previous work, it’s probably best to wait for Sideways to hit the rental shelf – at least that way, you can fast forward it when you start to feel a wine-sniffing lecture coming on.
