Sideways (2004) Review
9/10
Miles is a failed novelist teaching eighth grade English and waiting on a publisher who is not going to call. Jack is an actor doing voiceover work who is getting married on Saturday and intends to sleep with somebody first.
The 9 is for a comedy that keeps revealing worse information about its protagonists and never stops being funny. Miles is not a sensitive man ground down by circumstance. He is a self-pitying thief who steals from his mother in the first act, and the film knows it.
The withheld point is Jack, who is written slightly broader than the other three and occasionally functions as a plot generator instead of a person. Thomas Haden Church is so good that it mostly does not matter.
The First Act Is a Trap
For twenty minutes the film appears to be about a decent man with a boorish friend. Miles knows about wine, quotes poetry, is grieving a divorce, and is stuck with a groom who wants a week of infidelity.
Then he visits his mother for her birthday, and while she is out of the room he takes money from her dresser. It is done quickly, without comment, and the film moves on.
Everything after that scene reads differently. His wine expertise is a way of being superior in rooms where he has no other standing. His grief is a performance he has been running for two years. The novel is not being rejected because publishing is cruel, and by the end he knows it.
That is the film’s method throughout. It gives you a reading, lets you settle into it, then supplies one fact that reorganizes everything, and it never announces that it has done so.
Paul Giamatti was not nominated, which was the loudest omission of that awards year. The performance is built entirely on suppression, a man who has decided he is owed something and cannot say so, and awards bodies have never known what to do with a lead who refuses to have a big scene.
A single unremarked action can recharacterize a protagonist more efficiently than any amount of interiority. The reader revises backward, which is work they do themselves and therefore believe.
Place it early and give it no weight. If the film had scored the moment or cut to a reaction, it would have been a scene about Miles being a thief. Unscored and unremarked, it is information.
The test for whether it worked: can the reader still like him? Sideways wants you to keep watching Miles with affection while knowing exactly what he is, which is much harder to write than a simple fall.
Everybody Is Lying About Something
Jack does not tell Stephanie he is getting married. Miles does not tell Maya that Jack is getting married, which makes him complicit. Stephanie finds out and breaks Jack’s nose with a motorcycle helmet.
The structure is a farce built out of one withheld fact, and the film plays the consequences straight. Maya’s reaction is not comic. She is furious in a way that is entirely proportionate and she leaves, and the film lets Miles sit in that for a long time.
Virginia Madsen has the film’s best scene and it is a monologue about why she likes wine, delivered on a porch, which is really about being thirty-something and alone and hoping something improves with age. Madsen was nominated and did not win, and it is the moment people remember.
What makes the scene work is that Miles answers it badly. She has said something true and vulnerable and he responds with more technical information, because talking about wine is the only way he knows to be in a room. The film cuts on his failure and does not underline it.
Sandra Oh’s Stephanie is the one nobody defends and she is right about everything. She has a daughter, she has been lied to for a week, and her violence is the only honest reaction anybody has in the film.
The film is quietly aware of what it is doing to its women. Maya and Stephanie both exist inside a week that two men have arranged around themselves, and the picture gives each of them one scene where the arrangement is visible from their side. That is not equal weight and it is more than the genre usually manages.
The Wine Is Character, Not Set Dressing
Everything Miles says about wine is about himself and the film trusts you to notice without a single line pointing at it.
His contempt for merlot is snobbery with no basis he can articulate. His devotion to pinot noir comes with a speech about how it is thin-skinned, difficult, needs constant attention and only expresses itself under exactly the right conditions, which is a self-portrait he does not know he is painting.
The 1961 Cheval Blanc is the payoff and it is the best joke in the film. He has been saving it for a special occasion, and the wine is a Bordeaux blend heavy in merlot, the thing he claims to despise. He drinks it alone from a paper cup in a fast food restaurant.
That ending is precise. He does not have a revelation, he does not make a speech, he drinks the best thing he owns in the worst possible circumstances because he has finally worked out that waiting for the occasion is how you end up with nothing.
Let a character’s expertise be a confession. What somebody chooses to be knowledgeable about, and how they deploy it, characterizes them faster than any biography.
Never explain the parallel. The pinot speech works because nobody in the scene says it is about him, and the audience makes the connection and owns it.
Then subvert the expertise once. The Cheval Blanc reveal costs the film nothing and demolishes two hours of Miles’s authority in a single fact he already knew and never applied to himself.
Payne Films Middle Age Without Flinching
Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor adapted Rex Pickett’s novel and the film is unusually specific about a particular kind of failure: not dramatic ruin, just a man in his forties who has not become what he expected.
The physical comedy is the cruelest part of that. Miles running naked from a house, Jack hiding in a vineyard, the two of them in a hospital, and none of it staged for glamour. These are two out-of-shape men making poor decisions in daylight.
Phedon Papamichael shot the Santa Ynez Valley in golden light and split screens, and the beauty of the setting is deliberately at odds with what is happening in it. Nobody in this film deserves this scenery.
Rolfe Kent’s score is the other quiet decision. It is jazzy and light, and it keeps insisting the film is a caper while the events get progressively worse, which is what keeps the whole thing watchable.
Payne had made Election and About Schmidt before this and would make The Descendants after, and the through line is people who are wrong about their own lives being observed without contempt. He is the rare American director whose comedy has no cruelty in it and no forgiveness either.
It Moved the Wine Market
Sixteen million dollars, about a hundred and nine million worldwide, five Academy Award nominations and a win for Payne and Taylor’s adapted screenplay. For a film with no stars, almost no plot and two leads the audience is meant to see clearly, that is a considerable result and very little like it has been funded by a major studio in the years since.
The commercial afterlife is unusual. American merlot sales fell and pinot noir sales rose measurably after release, an effect economists studied and named after the film. A comedy about two men behaving badly changed what a country drank.
That happened because the film gave a mass audience a vocabulary and a position, and positions are easier to adopt than knowledge. Miles is wrong about merlot and the film says so in its final scene, and the audience took the opinion and left the correction behind.
There is a lesson in that about influence and it is not a comfortable one. Work does not transmit its argument, it transmits its surface, and the surface here was a man being confidently contemptuous about a grape.
Audiences adopt attitudes faster than they adopt arguments. If your character holds a wrong opinion attractively, expect the opinion to travel and the correction to stay behind.
That is not a reason to sand off the attitude. It is a reason to know it will happen and to decide whether you can live with it.
The structural defense is to make the correction the ending. Sideways does exactly that and it still lost, which tells you how much weight a last scene carries against two hours of charisma.
Should you watch Sideways?
Yes, and watch the mother’s house scene closely. Everything the film later reveals about Miles is already there in about six seconds, unscored and unremarked, and once you have seen it the whole picture changes shape without a single line of dialogue explaining anything.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 3 of my film lists