A Hard Grape To Grow

Some memories stay with you, like it or not. I can still remember where I was and what I was doing when it happened. In morning traffic, heading from my appointment to my job, going over in my head what had been discussed when right at that moment I made the decision to stop drinking. Just like that. This was a little over ten years ago now, the official anniversary was several months back as I write this, but at first there was no way to know what would happen. I had no idea if it would last, but it was the decision that I made, almost as if realizing for the very first time it was an option. It took about six weeks before I told anyone because you can’t tell people right off the bat. But it happened. It wasn’t even that hard because I made the decision and that was that, but there was a lot of thinking by me for some time about what it all meant. What did it say about me and my life? Had I just been drinking too much or was it something more than that? Did the difference even matter? Maybe the only thing that mattered was at one point I was drinking and then I stopped. And that hasn’t changed.

Now it’s been over ten years. A lot of other things have changed, of course. And in addition to everything else sometimes I’ve wondered about the various films that have explored the subject of drinking, but it still isn’t something I particularly want to write about. You might be able to think of a few of the titles. Billy Wilder’s THE LOST WEEKEND, Blake Edwards’ DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES. The little-seen SMASHED, which stars an excellent Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Edgar Wright’s THE WORLD’S END, which plays like a much different movie for me now than it did on opening night. Of course, there’s ARTHUR, which also means there’s ARTHUR 2: ON THE ROCKS but never mind about that one. But each of the others are worth remembering. And the alcoholism angle of THE VERDICT may be of secondary importance to the plot, but Paul Newman holding that coffee cup while defiantly not picking up the ringing phone in the last shot stays with me. But truthfully, as much as my life is spent connecting to films, I never gave much thought to all this in relation to myself. It was something I went through and then I took care of it, which is my own private journey. End of story. And I don’t regret it for a second.

Still, to bring up another film in which drinking plays a part, there is Alexander Payne’s SIDEWAYS. A film about a writer, a film about a man who is depressed. Can’t imagine why I would relate to this. We don’t even need to get into to how it’s also a film about someone who likes to drink wine a lot and while I enjoyed wine myself very much it would be a massive stretch to claim I was ever any sort of expert. But I can certainly relate to having strong opinions about things. Also, even when I was drinking, I never liked Merlot and whatever the reasons are for the main character’s reaction to the possibility of drinking it, it feels like SIDEWAYS gets that part right. And it gets a lot of other things right too. This shouldn’t be forgotten. And maybe now I can look at it as a film about the sort of person that I’m not anymore. At least, I hope so.

When unpublished novelist and eighth-grade teacher Miles (Paul Giamatti) picks up his actor friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church) to take him away for a week to Santa Barbara wine country before getting married, Miles simply wants to spend the week relaxing and drinking wine. Jack, barely giving any thought to his upcoming wedding, is all too aware of Miles’ depression over his divorce and novel not getting published and is fully intent finding him a girl while they’re up there. And he has intentions along these lines for himself as well. Their first night out at dinner they meet Maya (Virginia Madsen) a waitress at the Hitching Post, who already knows and seems to like Miles. The second day they meet Stephanie (Sandra Oh), a pourer at one of the wineries who also knows Maya and a double date is quickly arranged for that night. Jack doesn’t waste any time with Stephanie but Miles is more hesitant and though things eventually begin to go better for him and Maya, his problems once again begin to weigh on him, not to mention the truth of Jack’s situation which the two of them have been keeping from both women.

The films directed by Alexander Payne are often about dreamers trapped in lives with dreams that feel like they’re getting further away all the time and it may already be too late. His films are set in a messy world. If he’s given the choice between an actor in a scene who has either combed their hair or not, he chooses to throw the comb as far away as possible, he’s never seen a car that he wanted to pull into a car wash to get clean. And there’s someone at the center of all that messiness who can’t stop dreaming of the way they want it to be, the life they wish they could live and they’re unable to figure out why it can’t always be that way, unable to get out of the rut they’re trapped in. So much of what their life is has already been planted into the ground and they didn’t even realize it before they’re stuck there in who they are, trapped in clutter and it all fits in perfectly with Payne’s approach to every single scene. His films are acerbic but somehow soothing, able to get under our skin with all the growing tension imaginable but also comforting in how painfully relatable they are and how the things the characters dream of are there, just barely out of reach. His characters are sometimes awful but they’re still recognizable through the things they do to achieve some sort of relatability in all that messiness. The specificity to this world is something I recognize and feel at home in, even if I don’t always want to. And SIDEWAYS (screenplay by Payne and Jim Taylor, based on the novel by Rex Pickett) finds the ideal balance to all this. It’s only Payne’s fourth film as director, which seems crazy now, but it feels like a culmination of so many of the ideas he wants to explore about people and who they are when forced to look at what they’ve been doing in their lives. The clothes they wear, the food they eat, the wine they drink, the cars they drive and the people they have become because of everything around them.

This is all centered around a lead character who seems like he’s already given up, who tells a blatant lie right at the start (a small one, but still) and before the movie is even twenty minutes old does something terrible involving his mother, something that she might even suspect he’s doing already. So much of Miles is in what he does and how he behaves, obsessing over a book that may never be published and is certainly longer than anyone on the planet should have to read, looking for excuses to not try anything that doesn’t have to do with a glass of wine he can describe in full detail to whoever might be listening. A character who is desperate to have the world become what he wants, believing all that reading of the New York Times and doing the crossword puzzles will suddenly allow the world to realize he’s a man of intelligence. There’s a lot going on in Miles’s head that we never know about, likely a few things that he doesn’t want to be reminded about. Memories of his ex-wife and what went wrong there, memories of certain bottles of wine he drank, continually rewriting sentences from that endless book of his, but we don’t need to know the details. So much is already there in the way Paul Giamatti is slouched over and his eyes that are focused on all the things he doesn’t want to remember.

Miles and Jack were college roommates and their friendship probably made much more sense then. Jack seems to have the attention span of about ten seconds and floats through each moment unaware of any consequences, mainly focused on his own pleasure but it’s almost a surprise to revisit the film now and realize that as horrible as some of Jack’s behavior is, he often makes total sense when trying to talk to Miles about his situation with his divorce and book and the possibility of another woman. Miles just doesn’t realize it and Jack doesn’t always put it in the right words anyway, particularly his suggestion to Miles about his book to ‘get it in libraries’, but one thing that happens when revisiting this film after several years away is realizing how Jack is both horrible in some ways but also not always as dumb as he seems. It all just gets mixed up in his own stuff as he tries to think about anything at all except for his upcoming wedding. For Jack it’s all about the pleasure of the singular moment and nothing else, actually believing that he might really move up to wine country and move in with this woman he just met, doing all this for reasons that to him are obvious and Miles will never understand any of it. They’re different guys, too different by this point in their lives to keep all this going. College was a long time ago, except Jack only seems to partly realize this.

The way the film goes from title cards reading ‘Saturday’ at the start to ‘Saturday’ at the end underlines how much this is a trip that goes on a little too long. Like any vacation, it takes longer than expected to get going and never goes quite the way Miles wanted. Even through each serene shot of wine country, he’s never fully able to take a vacation from his own head so it becomes a road movie that keeps making stops, for wine tastings that give him all the time in the world to explain everything he knows about what they’re sampling to Jack as well as the side trip to Miles’ mother which turns out to have its own reason beyond stopping to say hello to her. But it all leads to Maya. For all the shots focusing on Paul Giamatti throughout the film to let us into the darkness of Miles’ head it’s Virginia Madsen who gets the close-up that really matters, one of the greatest I can think of. In a scene that culminates the long conversation between Miles and Maya that gets broken up into three sections of where they are—kitchen, couch and out on the porch—and after Miles gets to explain his love for Pinot that feels awfully close to his own thin-skinned self, she gets the monologue all about where her love of wine came from and why, where without saying it tells Miles everything he needs to hear about himself, trapped in the middle of living his own metaphor and still unable to do anything about it but what she does says it to him in a way she wants him to aspire to in life, not just accept. It’s a beautiful scene and a beautiful moment so naturally Miles’ response to this is beyond painful and something that of course I can understand. Or at least used to. Here and elsewhere in the film Giamatti and Madsen, or I should say Miles and Maya, have a chemistry that feels perfect and the two of them in a shot together gives the film a sense of total calm and it seems as right as everything Miles could ever want.

This all goes along like a dream, with Alexander Payne giving each scene a touch that always feels rich, playful and totally free, everything feels correctly lived in. The editing by Kevin Tent knows when to be jittery, knows when to relax, and knows when to hold on just the right look that someone is giving. Shot by Phedon Papamichael, the look of the film is earthy and alive, the jazzy score by Rolfe Kent playing all through it to counteract the abrasiveness, catching the right sense of emotion and the carefree feel of the moments that connect. The dialogue, especially coming from Jack, always catches the right joke in a moment especially when it talks around things like trying to talk around the subject of his upcoming wedding or his completely bullshit way of telling Miles that the new draft of his book is better. The extended montage where everything seems to finally be going right and Miles is finally starting to relax, ending in picnic during a gorgeous sunset, even when we know in the back of our minds all the lies and deceptions underneath this. That feeling catches in the throat, just like the laughs catch in the throat. Even the touching moments in the film get caught there. The film cuts deep while being totally soothing in the way it understands how the two feelings can get caught in between each other, just as it knows that the way the right food and wine can make you think about life. And it all makes wine seem kind of cool and fun as well, which it is, and talking about it doesn’t have to be pretentious like the stuffed shirt seen lecturing at one of the wineries. “A ’95 Opus One, with smoked salmon and artichokes, but we didn’t care,” Miles says when remembering a day with his ex and we might not understand why this particular wine shouldn’t go with that pairing, but we know he does. There’s a beauty to the way Alexander Payne stages those moments between two people, that always catches the right sense of what the scene needs to be and just how screwed up each other those relationships really are.

The trip is never in a rush, thanks to all the detours caused by both men, but the film isn’t in a rush either and any of those moments when it can pause for just the right character beat adds to the effect it has. There’s a moment where Miles and Jack are playing golf then get confronted by other players on the course and the way they deal with it shows them totally in synch with each other for just a few moments, probably like the friends they used to be and seems to give Miles a lift in a way nothing else in the film does, making him ready for Maya in a way he doesn’t even realize. The way the film pauses at times as they drive past these vineyards, filled with the grapes making all the wine that gives Miles some kind of clarity towards everything, the Pinot that he identifies with so much. So much of the time Miles and Jack are dealing with each other, trying to talk to each other about what they don’t want to talk about, as if neither one is ever listening to what the other is saying. Even when Miles is at his lowest after having finally learned his book is not going to sell, Jack is still making the attempt, trying to talk to him about things in a way that Miles never tries to do with him. Jack continues to go too far after everything goes wrong near the end and after lying about telling Maya (a slightly bigger lie than before, but still), there’s a very small piece of comeuppance involving his car but the way he helps Jack out of the biggest jam imaginable, which comes complete with a Bush-Rumsfeld cameo that seems so quaint now, is a small victory. It shows that Miles can achieve something if he’s forced to, no matter how screwed up all the reasons around it are.

To name a few of the later Alexander Payne films which received similar acclaim, THE DESCENDANTS and THE HOLDOVERS both work very well but they also feel like the director is doing a version of this thing again, however confident he is about it, the thing we’ve come to know and love. In SIDEWAYS he’s not trying to do it. He’s doing it. Following up his previous films CITIZEN RUTH, ELECTION and ABOUT SCHMIDT, SIDEWAYS feels like he’s perfecting the form and returning to it all these years later with very different thoughts going through my head it still feels close to perfect, a human comedy which cuts deep while completely understanding the people without excusing them and knowing their flaws. I kept away from this film for some years, partly because of all the drinking it contains but also the fear that because of those things maybe it wouldn’t speak to me anymore. Or maybe I was just afraid of all the bad feelings it would bring up. But it’s a wonderful surprise to find how beautifully the film has held up and I feel even closer to it now. I do still think about my own life while watching this and some of the things I don’t do anymore. All that drinking is in the past for me now but even if I’m in a completely different place deep down, I know some of those feelings are still there, just different, just as the stress is different as well as the depression, the fear, the regrets. Of course they exist. And SIDEWAYS knows that they’re always going to be there. The point is just not to drown in all that. I learned some time ago that when it comes to certain things in life, you need to move on. And maybe where that leads you to just might be the answer.

Maya is the dream woman in the film’s eyes, even if Miles can barely admit it to himself at first. She’s also one of those women who turn up in life when you don’t expect it and the film is clearly aware that she’s someone with her own past and regrets. It’s a woman who looks at you a certain way which can have such a power you don’t even notice it, because this has never happened before. And maybe all that matters is if you get an answering machine message like the one Maya leaves for Miles at the end. A message that tells you the exact right thing and now is the time to act on it. Because there’s no point in waiting, even if it also doesn’t hurt to sometimes pause and appreciate how good certain things are. SIDEWAYS begins and ends with a knock at a door. The first one wakes up the main character, irresponsible as always. The second comes when he’s ready. Ready to look someone else in the eyes and admit that things can be another way. Those things can be good. There’s no guarantee it’ll work out, but you never know.

Paul Giamatti’s performance feels like a miracle. There isn’t a thing he says, a gesture he makes in the film that ever feels wrong. I could go on listing all the moments here, beginning with his reaction to being told by someone the reason that reading fiction doesn’t interest them, the way he looks up when he first sees Maya at the restaurant, the sting in his voice when he calls his mother by her first name. The way he walks, the way he keeps silent when outraged, the way he keeps that smile on his face when told a certain piece of news near the end and a few minutes later, the look on his face when eating a certain burger and there’s more in the satisfaction of that moment each time I see it. Before this film, Thomas Haden Church had made me laugh in movies that didn’t quite deserve his comic timing and here finds the absolute ultimate version of that, trying to talk to his friend in the most clueless way possible and totally shutting out every possibility of consequences from his mind until it’s absolutely too late. There are so many levels and yet so much is in the way he says ‘oaky’ to describe a wine he’s just tasted. Virginia Madsen is a lifeforce, so much in her big speech but it’s also in her eyes and the looks she gives Miles in every scene, how she reverts to level-headedness when everything about the situation becomes clear. She deserved the Oscar for this. The best of Sandra Oh is in the little moments and how much she puts into just a little bit of screentime, beginning with saying she should be spanked and I particularly like how vulnerable she first seems when they first pull up for her what turns out to be her last moment, with Jack having no idea of the pain that’s coming. Marylouise Burke as Miles’ mother in just a few moments finds a certain balance between total flightiness and seemingly complete awareness of what’s going on and Jessica Hecht is also memorable as ex-wife Victoria when she turns up at the wedding, offscreen when she says her biggest revelation but also clearly trying to be kind to the ex-husband that she doesn’t need to be kind to anymore.

Alexander Payne has said that one of the key inspirations for SIDEWAYS is Dino Risi’s wonderful and funny 1962 film IL SORPASSO, a comedy about two very different personalities who take an unexpected road trip together with surprising results. Introducing the film on the Criterion Blu-ray, he talks about how he was once approached about doing a remake and though he doesn’t say it flat out, I imagine he liked the idea of doing a movie similar to IL SORPASSO (no surprise, Scorsese has spoken highly of the film as well so you should see it) but didn’t want to remake it, then when SIDEWAYS turned up it was a eureka moment. SIDEWAYS isn’t quite a road movie the way IL SORPASSO is but it is about two people who have driven away from their usual lives for a few days and what happens when they veer off the expected path. It’s the point in life where you’re old enough to have regrets and may have gone too far down the wrong road but it doesn’t have to be that way. I liked wine. In my mind I still do, I suppose. Wine is good, after all. But I don’t miss it and I don’t miss those other things I liked to drink either. There are other things out there for me now. What happened was I stopped drinking. And eventually something good happened. All this likely means that I missed my chance to take a decent tour of the locations up in Santa Ynez since it would involve a lot of wine tasting I wouldn’t want to take part in. My loss, but that’s ok. SIDEWAYS is one of the best films, one of the most human films of that early 2000s period and it’s felt in each moment. Those emotions tend to stick around. And sometimes the right thing happens to create another memory that gives you a reason to keep going. Because there is one. And there will be.