Sideways
When I was in high school, I knew two guys, best friends, whom the girls nicknamed "Teddy and the Stud." Teddy (as in Bear) was short, serious, sympathetic, every woman's best friend. The Stud just slept with them all. That kind of male-bonding symbiosis is common and -- who knows? -- maybe even useful for the propagation of the species, since a Teddy's sensitivity reflects onto a Stud, and a Stud lends a Teddy his sex appeal. But I've often wondered how far into adulthood such friendships can go before collapsing into resentment and bile.
With "Sideways," Alexander Payne's comic masterpiece of male (self) deception, we have our answer: The friendship lasts until the road trip before the Stud's wedding, after Teddy has drunk a spit-bucket of merlot in a fit of splenetic rage but before the Stud has had to run several miles back to his motel, naked, at 4 in the morning. I thus heartily recommend the movie to all men between the ages of 30 and 55 -- if they can take it. "Sideways" offers few consolations besides the bitter, healing laughter of the morning after.
Our Teddy is Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti), a San Diego wine fanatic and unsuccessful novelist who's two years divorced and mired in the slough of despond. Not only is Miles a loser, he knows he's a loser, and every glance in the mirror confirms it. Such men are not great fun to be around.
His former college roommate Jack (Thomas Haden Church) looks in the mirror all the time, because he's a Hollywood actor who has held onto his studly looks and he needs the reassurance. With career slumping and marriage looming, Jack coerces Miles into a tour of the California wine country: one last boy's week out. Miles thinks he can teach Jack about the glories of pinot noir, a grape as thin-skinned as he is. Jack thinks he can get them both some action.
It's the sweet genius of "Sideways" to peel back the psychological defenses of both men and leave you somehow liking them more. The movie picks up steam when Jack arranges a double date with Stephanie (Sandra Oh), a sexy vineyard pourer, and Maya (Virginia Madsen), a waitress and fellow oenophile on whom Miles has long had a crush. By this point, Jack has enmeshed his friend in a complicated web of deceit, and the laughs spring from the way one man keeps piling lies on top of the tower while the other keeps sourly pulling them out from the bottom. It's only a matter of time before the whole thing comes crashing down.
Based on a novel by Rex Pickett, "Sideways" is in fact a comic symphony of lies, orchestrated by Payne with the finesse of a vintage Hal Ashby ("The Last Detail"). The movie starts with a minor social fib and ends with a whopper involving intentional vehicular damage, and in between there are white lies, passive-aggressive lies, wholesale chicaneries, and more, all springing from the doomed attempt to hold onto youth. You can see Miles's eyes pinwheel with the idea that the truth might set him free -- it's actually sort of attractive once you've hit absolute rock bottom -- but Jack's not having any. He can't.
Payne and his screenwriting partner Jim Taylor have already made three fine dark comedies about various people up various trees: 1996's "Citizen Ruth" (Laura Dern as a welfare-mom basket case claimed by both sides in the abortion battle), 1999's "Election" (student priss Reese Witherspoon versus dyspeptic teacher Matthew Broderick), and 2002's "About Schmidt" (Jack Nicholson gets old). "Sideways" -- the title is both the proper way to store a wine bottle and the angle one sees the world from when drunk -- is as pitiless as any of them, but for the first time the gleeful cruelty is gone. The new movie is often uncomfortable to watch, but it's generous to a fault and to the characters' faults, too. Jack and Miles are dogs, but eventually you let dogs back into the house. At least Payne does.
It helps that the dialogue is pitch-perfect in its attention to wine pomposity, frat-house bravado, and the middle-age male terror of simply not mattering. It helps, too, that when the director needs to lay his cards on the table, he comes through with a pair of gorgeously written and performed monologues about loneliness and wine, delivered by Miles and Maya to each other on a late-night back porch. And it helps most that "Sideways" is funny as hell, particularly when Jack's ego is on the line.
If you only know Thomas Haden Church as the guy from "Wings," you're in for a surprise; here he's like the Big Bad Wolf caught with his pants down. Madsen, an up-and-comer in the 1980s, has been AWOL for some time, and her playing of Maya -- a blessedly normal woman with a bit of wary poetry in her -- constitutes a welcome return.
But, really, it's Giamatti's movie every step of the way. He's been working up to a role this big and this deep for years, from character parts and Pig Vomit in the Howard Stern movie "Private Parts" to his great, snarling turn as Harvey Pekar in last year's "American Splendor." As Miles he gets it all: the anger, the self-pity, the gallows humor, the disgust, the delusion, and finally the awful clarity that none of Payne's heroes have been graced with before. (As an extra treat, we get to glimpse a photo of the actor in his youth with his late dad, former Yale president and baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti.)
Giamatti plays Miles as the ultimate Teddy, and he's heartrendingly comic. It's a performance so nuanced and so real in its everyday pain that it doesn't stand a chance of winning an Oscar. But it should.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
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