Grappling with the Grape

I don’t know whether Alexander Payne is a particularly good director—I was lukewarm about Citizen Ruth (1996) and Election (1999) and avoided About Schmidt (2002) because I loved Louis Begley’s novel and could abide the drastic changes in setting and character.  Sideways is perfectly agreeable, however, and does show that Payne has his knack for character development: the Laura Dern, Matthew Broderick, and (I’m told) Jack Nicholson characters were all first-rate.  Here, Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church make a slight and slightly too familiar story worth your time.

     It’s a buddy movie with a road movie angle: two guys, one about to get married, on a grande bouffe week in California wine country before the ceremony.  If the buddies don’t click in a buddy movie, it’s cooked; here, they’re terrific together as a pair of guys who need to distract attention (principally their own) from their decline.  Giamatti’s schnuck, a failed-novelist junior high school teacher whose wife dumped him, hides behind the jargon of an oenophile.  Church’s stud, a former tv actor now in voice-overs and fading, disguises career anxiety behind a rampant libido.  It works, and in part because Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh have characters who are much more than convenient bedmates.

     Church’s character is, shall we say, uncomfortably close to his own resumé, which is mostly in small-bore tv work.  Giamatti, a graduate of Yale Drama School (and the son of Bart Giamatti, the former president of Yale who went on to be president of the American League and, briefly, commissioner of baseball), has been getting parts steadily for more than twenty years.  Only with last year’s American Splendor did he demonstrate, perhaps to the surprise of many, that he could carry a film, although he got a tremendous lift from Hope Davis.  Here, he has closed the debate decisively.  Is there anyone else around who could have delivered this line so convincingly: “I am not drinking merlot tonight, I am not drinking fucking merlot.” 

Comments

[Chuck Wallace]

This is the most right-on review I have seen about Sideways. Not only is the typical fluff avoided but the Payne, Buddy film and Giamatti nails are hit square on the head. And I think the merlot line was the best in the movie.