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" The Gravel Pit "
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Movies / TV
Movie Review: "Sideways"
Posted by R. E. Pierson on Jan 13, 2005, 23:49
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So "Sideways" is not really a movie about wine-tasting. Nor is it a road movie (although the film sets you up to expect both of these things). I'm tempted to call it a coming-of-middle-age story. We feel like it's going to be one of those stories about "the time I took a trip with my best friend to the wine country of Santa Barbara that changed our lives forever," but by the end we don't get much indication that their lives WILL BE changed forever. It's ripe with those wonderful moments of anxiety you recognize from your youth, when you just met this girl you really really liked and had no idea how to pursue her. Then it makes you realize, "What the hell is going on, this is a middle-aged English teacher." It takes that moment-to-moment "lust for life" spirit of young people who think the world is pure possibility, and puts that spirit in another middle-aged man. This movie has the spirit of a child and the mind of an adult. Doctor Seuss wrote "Oh, the Places You'll Go!" when he was near the end of his life, and this movie is like watching Seuss as he writes it.
For a film whose subjects are twice as old as I am, the material felt shockingly familiar to me. It's a movie that, in so many ways, just FEELS right. It knows exactly what a horrible ordeal the simple act of being alive is, and still celebrates that act shamelessly in all its unpredictable glory. The film's director, Alexander Payne (with his writing partner Jim Taylor), finds laughs in the most harrowing of places and makes it go down easy, yet never lets us forget how much it hurts to go to those places. "Sideways" deals with wasted lives, lost opportunities of all kinds, alcoholism, infidelity, and the daunting smallness of day-to-day life. Then it looks these subjects dead in the eye, and laughs at them with a terribly human, giddy abandon.
Countless movies divide themselves into little chapters based around days of the week, but I can't think of a single movie that uses said structure to better effect than this one. The days follow a peculiar rhythm that resonates with the randomness of everyday life. Some of them end well, some of them end badly, some of them end without any real sense of completion, some of them just bleed into the next one. Payne makes great comic and dramatic use of the tool. He will end a day with a set-up and begin the next day with the punchline. He will ask questions like, "Will he spend the night at her place?" and answer the question by just leaving his camera on the exterior shot of the house through to morning, breaking it up with a title card. It's simple, extremely conventional shorthand, but breaking the shot up with the title card punctuates it nicely and gives it the extra "oomph" it needs. Some days, the characters keep trying to make the most of the day, do whatever they can to make it better before it's over. Some days, the characters just give up and wait until tomorrow, when they hope something better will come along. Or the next day.
Time is a large, looming presence in the film. The characters are always aware of it, and it never does what they want it to do. There's the divided sense of desperately making the most of what they can and trying to follow their dreams from college before it's too late, yet filling each day with activities just to fill the day. Constantly the characters are passively asking, "What are we doing today?" They are also asking, "What am I doing wasting my life?" They never think to make any connection between the two.
Payne and Taylor have a wonderful way of etching characters full of personality flaws who make bad decisions, and he lets his characters fuck up. A lot. They try to do the right thing like most of us, but more often than not they get it wrong (like most of us). About eighty percent of the decisions these characters have to make are made to clean up the mess from previous bad decisions they made, and eighty percent of those choices lead to more messes.
This would quickly turn the movie into a very sour affair, full of frustratingly unlikable people, but the filmmakers have an intuitive sense of when to pull back before it gets to be too much, and give them a small chance to shine. More often than not, it's with a laugh. After a heated argument the two best friends, Miles and Jack, are having on the golf course about how Miles has a pathetic, shitty life and Jack is an asshole, Payne interrupts the action with a group of golfers who start hitting balls at them because they're holding up the course. The argument is instantly forgotten, and the characters seize the opportunity to fuck around: Miles hits a ball right at the aggressors' golf cart (his first good shot of the day), and Jack chases them away by running after them and making animal noises. It's a moment that comes out of nowhere and totally interrupts the narrative, but it's exactly what the scene needs. It's there for rhythm, to give the characters and the audience a little break. You don't just laugh because it's funny, you laugh because it eases the tension and gives you a chance to celebrate this small victory with the characters. It's a laugh that, just by its placement, is able to hit home and add meaning to the scene.
The structure of the film inhabits this deliciously weird space between the tight point-A-to-point-B storytelling of a slick Hollywood script, and the unpredictably episodic "wandering protagonist" form of a French New Wave film. What results is a story constantly teetering on the edge in the most delightful way, where everything is in exactly the right place, yet you're not quite sure what will happen next. There are just enough failed goals and abandoned directions to make it lifelike, without making you give up on the story. At times Payne and Taylor go absurdly out of their way to let you up for air when the story is about to get too heavy-handed. The most extreme example deals with the consequences of Jack picking up a waitress just to make himself feel better about getting dumped earlier that day. It goes on for a good ten minutes, and is never referred to again. Thank God it wasn't cut. Not only does it give the movie its best scene, when Miles just can't stop laughing at the situation they're in, but it doesn't feel unnecessary at all. It gives the film a wonderfully warm pulse to assure you that, although Payne will hardly ever give these people what they want, they always get what they NEED in a way that leaves you satisfied. The comic bits always work, often on several levels, lightening the tone and still having a harsh tragic bite to them. The dramatic bits are poignant and understated, stopping just before they get excessive.
Payne knows just how to make these characters' lives unresolved and messy without diluting the drama. Sometimes the characters come out of it all having learned absolutely nothing, and we get every indication that they'll keep fucking up. Everything, especially in Miles's life, turns into a battle for some kind of satisfaction in life, and a lot of these battles are lost. Sometimes things happen that the characters deeply did not want to happen, and the victory comes in just learning to deal with it. Payne knows exactly how and where to place the set-ups and the payoffs. Sometimes they pay off in the way you'd expect from a tight, linear, A-to-B story; sometimes the payoffs come in unexpected ways; sometimes the payoff is in NOT giving us the payoff.
It keeps you on your toes, but it's never dramatically unsound or unsatisfying. It's a movie that knows how to savor the small victories, the little moments when two or three of the hundreds of things you battle for that day come together just right.
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