| Sideways,
like Phantom, ruminates on love and un-love, but through
the prism of “reality,” the personal travails of high
school teacher and failed novelist Miles (Paul Giamatti). Sideways
is first of all a buddy movie: Miles persuades best friend Jack
(Thomas Haden Church) to spend one last guy week on a wine-tasting
trip before Jack’s upcoming nuptials. Stellar writing team
Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor (Election, Citizen Ruth, About
Schmidt) adapt Rex Pickett's novel of the same name, yet their
effort, at least the first half, disappoints. Their Miles is a wine
lover, but a spectacular and unattractive drunk as well. After he
goes “sideways” once or twice, we wonder if his wine
snobbery simply masks a drinking problem. Miles and his angst, the
rejection of his novel, his fixation on his divorce, his every moue
of self-inflicted alienation and depression wear thin; only the
radiant performance by Virginia Madsen rescues the film from last-sex-romp-before-the-wedding
movie hell. (Note to young filmmakers: scenes that were once edgy,
like the protagonist at urinal/toilet, become hopelessly clichéd
with overuse. Avoid them.)
Madsen is a revelation as Maya, the inspirational core of the movie.
Her mature and natural beauty, sans stage makeup, at 30-something
only enhances her performance as the object of Miles’ paralyzed
affection. Maya lives in a world populated by shallow figures like
her ex-husband and her friend Stephanie (Sandra Oh) who lurches
thoughtlessly through life in a series of joyless boinks, and, yes,
Miles. It strains credulity, but Maya sees something of a kindred
soul in him, getting to know him on his many visits to the wine
country restaurant where she works as a waitress. Miles, of course,
cannot see her at all through his fog of self-loathing. Ultimately
the breezy hedonist Jack finally engineers a date between the two
oenophiles, and the two haltingly begin a romance. While Miles possesses
an obsessive, encyclopedic knowledge of wine factoids, it is Maya
who shows him why it matters. Wine provides Miles with a target
for his withering judgmentalism, but to Maya winemaking represents
the ebb and flow of life itself. In an eloquent moonlit soliloquy,
she evinces more connectedness in the history of a storied bottle
of wine than Miles can in his entire nebbish existence. (A speech
such as this is a writer’s gift to an actor, and Madsen returns
it in kind.) Not surprisingly, Miles shrinks away, paralyzed by
his sense of unworthiness, but he can’t get her off his mind.
His struggle towards her light against his own dark undertow animates
the second half of the film and, in a way, ties Sideways to
Phantom. Both films extol a struggle for good, whether
based on morality or self-actualization, by men who seek the better
angels of their nature -- with a goddess awaiting them as their
just reward, should they prevail.
--
Patricia Ducey
Copyright Web del Sol, 2004 |
