PERSONAL FAVES: Sideways

I first saw ‘Sideways’ at my local multiplex in February 2005; I went to see it again two weeks later. I bought the DVD on the day of release. I’ve watched it two or three times a year since then. On first viewing, I came to the conclusion that Alexander Payne was the next great American director. Simple as that.

‘Sideways’ made it three in a row after ‘Election’, one of very few films set in a high school that’s nonetheless intelligent, sophisticated and razor-sharp in its satire (seriously: if Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’ distils the whole brutal ethos of the adult world into a juvenile microcosm, ‘Election’ does the same for American politics, emerging as cleverer, funnier and more acute than an entire series of ‘The West Wing’) and ‘About Schmidt’, the unlikeliest road movie this side of ‘The Straight Story’, wherein Jack Nicholson turned in a late period performance of such understated pathos that you rediscover what a great actor he is. By turns humorous, whimsical and melancholy, ‘About Schmidt’ is also honest, featuring the quietest yet the most devastatingly poignant ending.

Hard to believe it’s been four years since ‘Sideways’ and with the exception of a contribution to a portmanteau film about Paris, we’re still waiting for Payne’s follow up, ‘Fork in the Road’ from Dennis Hamill’s novel about an Irish-American film-maker’s relationship with a passionate but unpredictable gypsy woman and the correlation between life and art. With a little bit of luck, a fair wind and a huge amount of talent (and Payne has the latter, lordie yessum) ‘Fork in the Road’ could be a classic in waiting.

But for the moment we have ‘Sideways’, a bona fide classic and a production that I am convinced will be remembered as the best American film of this decade. Beautifully scripted, impeccably acted and oh the direction! In an era of film-making where most directors seem to scream at the camera “LOOK AT MEEEEEEEEEEEE! I’M DIRECTING!!!”, Alexander Payne does something radical and wonderful that I’d like to give him a great big hug and buy him a pint for: he assumes his audience are intelligent and sensitive and can think about what they’re watching instead of being told it.

This is how good the direction is: you forget that it’s a film and somebody directed it. That’s it. End of. I can’t think of higher praise. The best books I’ve read have made me forget I was turning pages and looking at printed words: I’ve lived inside them and known the characters. The best paintings and photographs I’ve seen haven’t been contained within a frame and held permanently in stasis: they’ve made me think that I’ve just blinked and still have imprinted on the retina a scene that’s even now changing and spilling out and generating a new dynamic.

I know the characters in ‘Sideways’. I’ve spent time with them. I recognise myself in them. That neither of the protagonists are, on the surface, particularly sympathetic makes Payne’s achievement – by the final frames, all sins are forgiven and you desperately care about them – all the more impressive. Miles (Paul Giametti) is a middle-aged high school teacher, would-be novelist and wine snob. He’s self-important, depressive and not above ripping off his mother for a couple of hundred dollars. His best friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church) is a once-successful actor now reduced to doing voiceovers and prepared to take a soul-destroying job in his prospective father-in-law’s real estate business.

Taking off for a week-long wine-tasting holiday before Jack finally ties the knot with his society-girl fiancée, ‘Sideways’ plays out as a finely observed study of failure, self-doubt and the occasional small moment of redemption. The humour and the melancholy derive in equal measure from the ‘Odd Couple’-style relationship between the mismatched protagonists. Miles is given to snobbery (“quaffable,” he opines of one vintage, “but a long way from transcendence”), while Jack’s retinue of comments strikes out no further intellectually than the succession of women he eyes up for his final fling (“God, that chick's hot”).

You’d have every reason not to like these guys. But they’re real. They are flawed and recognisable and all too human. The women they meet and get involved with – once-bitten-twice-shy Maya (Virginia Madsen) and uninhibited free spirit Stephanie (Sandra Oh) – throw their rumpled and compromised humanity into sharp relief. They are the real heroes of the film: women who hold out hope in the face of the failures of men.

Am I making ‘Sideways’ sound heavy? Not so. It’s intelligent. It’s perceptive. That doesn’t mean it’s not eminently watchable, very entertaining and often laugh-out-loud funny. Alexander Payne has cited Luis Buñuel as an inspiration (that shot of the ostrich means so much more in this context) and delivers an inspired sequence towards the end of the film – key components: sexual embarrassment, class barriers, quasi-voyeurism and the shock of the absurb – that would have made his idol proud.

Under the Tuscan Sun

As a non-fiction literary sub-genre, the moderately-successful-writer-buys-old-house-in-picturesque-European-village-befriends-the-locals-and-writes-bestseller-about-it is a fairly narrow field. Three titles pretty much define it: ‘A Year in Provençe’ by Peter Mayles, ‘A Valley in Italy’ by Lisa St Aubin de Teran, and ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’ by Frances Mayes.

There have been two attempts at capturing Mayles’ summery prose onscreen: the ill-advised BBC adaptation with John Thaw, and Ridley Scott’s ‘A Good Year’ starring Russell Crowe. I mean, come on – Russell Crowe as a fictionalised Peter Mayle! Lounging around in a vineyard! (“At my command … uncork another bottle.”)

St Aubin de Teran’s book, perhaps the most elegant literary work of the three, has yet to be subjected to the big screen treatment.

‘Under the Tuscan Sun’ was filmed in 2003, writer-director Audrey Wells’ only film to date apart from 1999’s ‘Guinevere’, a decent enough rites-of-passage movie starring Sarah Polley. ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’ is middlebrow, middle-of-the-road, inoffensive and somewhat pedestrian in its direction.

It would be so easy to criticise this movie. You could call it a chick flick (if you wanted to be really cruel, you could call it a middle-aged chick flick). You could call it chocolate box film-making (cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson’s camera positively bathes in the glorious scenery). You could accuse it of revelling in cliché (if you don’t see the last half dozen scenes coming like the QEII on a duckpond, you’re clinically dead). You could write off the last half hour as an excess of saccharine (seriously: the final reel isn’t just sugar-coated, it’s wound in clayfloss, dipped in whipped cream and drizzled with melted chocolate).

But I’ve got to admit … and it’s not just because of Diane Lane’s presence … I have a soft spot for ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’. And with my recent movie-viewing including ‘Che – Part One’, ‘Hell Drivers’ and ‘Emperor of the North’ – dark, intense films – ‘UTTS’ provides a pleasant change of pace: light-heartedness, sweeping sunny vistas, the laughter of friends, the flowing of wine and the transient joie de vivre of a May-to-September romance.

Having said that, the romantic subplot is probably the worst aspect of Wells’ fictionalisation of Mayes’ memoir, giving the film its clumsiest scenes and its single most awkward visual image.

On the whole, though, watching 'UTTS' it is like sinking into a bubble bath or getting that slight fuzzy feeling from your second or third glass of wine (or your second or third bottle, depending on your personal tolerance levels). It clears the palate before you reach for, say, ‘Unforgiven’ or ‘Deep Red’.

And to give the film its dues, it owns up to its clichés. My favourite scene comes fairly early on. Novelist Frances (Lane) has divorced her cheating bastard of a husband and moved into a gloomy apartment (“you’re a writer?” the realtor says; “you can help the others [tenants] write their suicide notes”); her best friend Patti (Sandra Oh) endeavours to cheer her up by treating her to a package tour of Tuscany. One of her fellow tourists, stumped at what to write on an obligatory postcard to his mother, calls upon Frances’ literary talents. She glances around the piazza, sees a gaggle of nuns eating ice cream, an expatriate British woman chatting with the locals, a small car weaving non-too-discreetly through a throng of pedestrians, a couple of bronzed and oleaginous types checking out women, people buying food and two small boys positively drooling over a gleaming red Ferrari. “It’s market day in Cortona,” she writes; “the piazza is an ongoing party and everyone is invited. Clichés converge at this navel of the world. You almost want to laugh, but you can’t help feeling these Italians know more about having fun than we do.”

It’s a nice moment, slightly self-deprecating. Much of the first half works on this level: a patchwork quilt of gently played-out scenes, such incident as there is deriving from character and observation without the need to force anything resembling a narrative arc on the proceedings … until, that is, the last forty minutes or so. Still, it’s just about forgivable. Wells might be a pedestrian film-maker, but her cast are perfect: Diane Lane transcends the material time after time, Sandra Oh makes an excellent foil and Lindsay Duncan is memorable as the expatriate British actress still living in a fantasy world of Rome à la Fellini. There’s a nod to ‘La Dolce Vita’ that could easily have been cringingly embarrassing, but comes off as curiously poignant.

My advice: crack a good bottle of Italian wine as the movie starts, enjoy a terrific first half with its celebration of female unity, then drink yourself into a pleasant stupor wherein the convergence of clichés no longer detract from the sheer gorgeousness of the Tuscan locations … and of the delectable Ms Lane.




Posted to coincide with Diane Lane’s 44th birthday. Up tomorrow on the Diane-fest: ‘The Big Town’.