Sideways

Starring Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, and Sandra Oh. Rated 18A.

God, it is said, is in the details. And it is the particulars of a real life that reveal to us the truth of the human condition. Life, while sometimes being truly horrible, can often seem hilarious when closely examined, and it's this seeming contradiction that fuels the work of director Alexander Payne. In Citizen Ruth, Payne dealt satirically with the argument over a woman's right to choose by giving the discussion to everyone but Ruth herself. In About Schmidt, Schmidt himself is set free by the disappointing realization that his unfulfilled life has imprisoned him.

In Sideways, Payne and coscreenwriter Jim Taylor continue to till the fertile soil of life's disappointment.

Although not as immediately catchy as Schmidt, Sideways succeeds most of the time, despite Payne and Taylor occasionally getting sidetracked by peripherals (the devil, too, is in the details) and their penchant for dark humour that's often too dark to be humorous.

Sideways succeeds due to Paul Giamatti, who brings to wine snob Miles Raymond both curmudgeonly pathos and an irascibility that made his Harvey Pekar such a cringing joy to watch in American Splendor. Miles's life, like his cherished bottle of Cheval Blanc '61, is on the shelf. He is stuck, moving sideways, unable to accept that his ex-wife is not coming home after three years and that his impenetrable novel will never really be published. Yet this downcast traveller can also become pretentious and self-congratulatory when the subject is wine. It's a hard range of emotion to convey in a movie, a delicate balance, but Giamatti adds pomposity to Miles's dubious status in life.

If the whining and dining Miles is a Felix Unger for our times, then his lowbrow travelling companion, Jack, played by Thomas Haden Church, is his randier, self-indulgent Oscar Madison. Jack, a soap-opera actor and commercial voice-over artist, is a has-been who barely was: his career is in free fall and his life as a bachelor will end with his marriage at the end of the week. Today's odd couple, however, is considerably grittier and the laughs are harder to come by.

When Miles meets a waitress named Maya, played convincingly by Virginia Madsen, he sees that he has marinated his life in the comfort of predictable failure. Madsen plays Maya with an all-knowing sparkle in her eyes that belies her own world-weariness. She enables Miles to shake off the faux optimism of happiness delayed and take the delightful risk of actually living.

Neither a laugh riot nor Lars Von Trier wrist slitter, Sideways is a character-driven and painstakingly detailed story of two men on a mission. It's just never clear what that mission is or whether they accomplish it. Just like life.

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