Yes, we watch movies to be entertained, but every so often movies do much more than that. Sometimes they are able to leap from the screen into our subconscious, into that place we never thought they could ever reach, much less tap into. And when it happens -- when they go from being bombastic fictitious concoctions to vignettes and passages seemingly ripped from our very own lives -- the experience is unequivocally magical. We are breathless afterwards from having been submerged in infinitely accessible material in ways we could not have predicted.
Sideways is indeed such an adventure. For, while the basic structure is a buddy picture and a road picture at once, it relentlessly pummels us with keenly intuitive snippets of life and often unflattering depictions of its principal characters. We fall instantly in love with the people in this movie because they remind us so much of ourselves and of our own friends.
Paul Giamatti is Miles, a writer who is still putting the pieces of his life together after a divorce. His best friend Jack (Thomas Hayden Church) is getting married in a few days, and he convinces Miles to take a trip to California's wine country for one last salute to bachelorhood. Miles and Jack are the Larry Appleton and Balki Bartokomous of the 2000's, buddies who are prone to getting into loads of trouble, but always together and still unshakable friends after all is said and done. Their goals for the trip are straightforward: Miles hopes to taste some fine wines and temporarily forget the woes thrust upon him by his ex, and Jack wants the two of them to bed as many women as possible before heading home.
They meet Maya (Virginia Madsen) and Stephanie (Sandra Oh), two of the locals who, mercifully, don't act as eccentric as the locals in any other movie typically would. They talk and they listen and they communicate like real people. Jack knows that Maya, a divorcee herself, and Miles would make a fine match, but getting the two on equal footing is too time-consuming a task at the moment, now that he and Stephanie have hooked up.
In a movie like Closer, another piece with but four principal roles, the characters feel they are obliged to tell the truth in order to "get off" on the unpredictable outcomes that such behaviour induces, but the characters in Sideways tell a fair bit of lies and half-truths to try to avoid potentially slippery situations. This is akin to real life, where we sometimes do the most outlandish things possible to avoid having to give a straight answer, even though it could save us boatloads of anguish and trouble afterwards.
Of the four principals, all but one manages to be entirely three-dimensional at every moment. Only Sandra Oh seems to exude a singular dimensionality, and even this is primarily a result of the requirements of the plot; the lack of screen time afforded her to create and sustain a proper character arc is mostly to blame. Giamatti is the most riveting. Watch his face in the scenes where he gets bad or unexpected news, or when wine is described to him by Maya, and in his eyes we see for the first time in the film he is able to forget about some of the sorrow that hangs around his head. It's a brilliant performance.
There are many richly memorable moments in Sideways, among them a retaliation on a golf course by Jack and Miles when a group of strangers tries to force them onto the next hole, a despairing drunken phone call from a restaurant that should never have happened, and one of the most unique ways of retrieving a wallet you're likely to ever see. On top of all the other merits of this film, directed by Alexander Payne (Election, About Schmidt), is that there is also a crash course on wines and and the art of wine-tasting.
The title could refer to the determination of the human spirit to get back up again after it has been knocked down, or to how we can't always live our lives on the straight and narrow (there are always curves along the way), or even to Jack's preferred (and usual) romantic inclinations. Regardless of one's in-depth interpretation of the name itself, Sideways is above all a funny, poignant, and always fascinating adventure that not only talks a lot about life, but contains and is a lot about life. Watching it is a deliriously uplifting experience.
