Sideways Closer
Cooper, Rand Richards
Rand Richards Cooper MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE 'Sideways' & 'Closer' The unanimous critical approval greeting Sideways has created some surprising Best Picture buzz-surprising, because Oscar rarely...
...But while Jack chases the women, Miles focuses on the wine...
...Yes, wine talk is precious and ridiculous...
...Closer suffers from the evaporation of a propriety that cannot be recreated...
...One of the pleasures of About Schmidt was watching iconic rebel Jack Nicholson get put through the grinder of Payne's nebbish machine...
...he's the kind of vain forty-something guy who wears loose shirts to cover the flab, and who in his vacuous enthusiasm still sounds like a seventeen-year-old...
...These girls, they want to party...
...Miles hates talking about his novel, because it makes him feel like a fraud...
...But, if any director can break this unspoken rule, it might well be Alexander Payne, the poet laureate of American losers...
...But far from transcendent...
...Sideways records the collision between the good life and two men pathetically incapable of living it...
...We see Miles reading while eating alone in a garish and empty Chinese restaurant...
...There is something ruefully cautionary for all men in the fates these two guys represent, their egregious flaws of character...
...And though Jack's role verges on cartoon, Thomas Haden Church nevertheless pegs a particularly American (some would say particularly Californian) variety of affable, ex-surfer-boy narcissism...
...Sideways both skewers and celebrates, with a tonal ambivalence that is Payne's trademark...
...When Miles sighs over his ex-wife, whom he still loves, and says, "She has the best palate of any woman I've ever known," his emotion is being taken seriously...
...Citizen Ruth gave us an unwed pregnant woman arrested for inhaling patio sealant...
...generated its power from within another era's far more enclosed conception of marriage (no escape hatch) and of community, with its comprehensive pressure to conform...
...Wine snobbery provides a broad target for satire, and Sideways hits it with scenes that are laugh-out-loud funny...
...Nichols's new movie gives us Internet sex chat rooms and futuristic strip clubs, a level of blank sexual openness-not only among the characters, but also between writer and audience-that makes almost nothing unsayable...
...It's nice to watch a young director develop a style...
...Well, by now it's 2004, and you probably know...
...Well, this time they have worked it out, catching the perfect balance of irony and affection that has eluded them in the past...
...There's too much oak and secondary malolactic fermentation...
...Later on, Miles and the equally introverted Maya flirt by complimenting each other on their discriminating wine palates, and when Maya makes a tremulous move for intimacy- "Miles, can I ask you a personal question...
...he scolds Miles during an evening out with Maya (Virginia Madsen) and Stephanie (Sandra Oh), two women they've met in town...
...Once the lid is off, the pot will never again boil quite so fiercely...
...but his kind of snobbishness, Sideways convinces us, is actually the opposite of phoniness...
...Only when he's being a snob is Miles authentic...
...Like the 1966 film, Closer originated in the theater, its script penned by the playwright, Patrick Marber, and it too elicits fine performances from a quartet of actors (Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Jude Law, and most impressively Clive Owen), playing two couples in a raucous dance of shifting desires and alliances...
...Payne makes you realize how lonely reading can be...
...Somewhat daringly, Payne and Taylor make the earnest moments of their movie hinge on precisely the same material as its satiric and comic moments...
...Miles has hit forty, with no publisher interested in his massive autobiographical opus...
...Payne sends Miles off on a five-day drive through California's Santa Inez Valley-a bachelor road party with his old college roommate, Jack, who is set to marry at week's end...
...His earlier films left viewers uncertain whether he was embracing his protagonists or mocking them, even humiliating them...
...You keep expecting Marcello Mastroianni...
...I do like Chardonnay," he insists...
...This paradox turns Sideways into more than a larky satire...
...Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...
...and The Graduate to Primary Colors and Angels in America- boasts four decades of superbly workmanlike success, a career and sensibility marked by an almost-too-unerring sense of what audiences want...
...When Jack casually remarks, "I thought you didn't like Chardonnay," the hapless nerd becomes a walking, talking encyclopedia of viticultural expertise...
...Big stretches of the movie look like bad wine commercials: couples laughing around dinner tables or cavorting through misty sunshine in the countryside, grapes glistening on the vine...
...Because Miles, it turns out, is a raging oenophile, a wine snob of the highest order...
...New American directors can rival the productive longevi-ty of Mike Nichols, whose resume-from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...
...Payne's first three movies depicted the flailings of some of recent American cinema's most pitiful protagonists...
...The marital warfare enacted by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor's characters, however, depended for its full effect on some things being generally considered quite unsayable...
...And the results, at least on the surface, are similarly pitiless...
...and as the fantasy of writing fame recedes, he's left amid the ugly detritus of his real life: divorce, bills he can't pay, a beat-up car and tiny apartment, and a job-teaching middle-school English-that he hates...
...In a far more decorous era, the film's clawing, wounding rages conveyed a frightening, revelatory honesty...
...Giamatti (last seen as the genius-schlemiel cartoonist in American Splendor) plays Miles, a would-be novelist living in San Diego...
...for today...
...It will be interesting to see what happens if he ever decides to go there...
...Nichols's new film, Closer, arrives hailed as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf...
...In Sideways, Payne doesn't have to work nearly as hard, since his leading loser is played by Paul Giamatti, an actor who sends the Geek-er Counter into seismic overload...
...And About Schmidt followed a widowed insurance salesman whose daughter marries into a family of dimwits...
...Asparagus," he pronounces solemnly, "and just a...
...When Miles participates in a wine tasting, he shoves his nose deep within the glass, inhaling ardently while for some reason rubbing his ear...
...An aging soap-opera actor, Jack has hit a brick wall in his career (his latest gig is a commercial for Spray 'n' Wash), and is counting on his wealthy prospective father-in-law for a job...
...watching it was like peering in on someone else's therapy-and shuddering to wonder what might come out in your own...
...aflutter of Edam cheese...
...Giamatti's dead-on performance helps immensely...
...Sideways has a literary feel...
...you've gotten used to a whole lot of other stuff, too...
...Like a magic elixir, wine brings out in Miles the man of confident judgments...
...It was as if Payne was pursuing an argument with himself about his deep intentions-or perhaps with his screenwriter, Jim Taylor...
...I just don't like the way they manipulate it in California...
...Rand Richards Cooper MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE 'Sideways' & 'Closer' The unanimous critical approval greeting Sideways has created some surprising Best Picture buzz-surprising, because Oscar rarely smiles on small movies with loser protagonists...
...Of course, there are viable alternatives to becoming Jack and Miles, or any of the other figures in Alexander Payne's gallery of failures...
...it's as if he is listening to the wine...
...reading on the toilet in his cluttered apartment...
...Closer is not set in the suffocating uniformity of a 1950s American college town, but in the cosmopolitan London of today, where anything goes...
...like other small films of recent years, such as In the Bedroom and You Can Count on Me, it puts the emphasis on character...
...Sideways offers an excruciating and hilarious anatomy of midlife male failure...
...But the more things remain the same, the more they change...
...Election chronicled the travails of a milquetoast high-school civics teacher traduced by a sexy and ambitious girl...
...Closer also aims at the earlier film's vertiginous psychosexual atmosphere-the erotic anger that expresses itself in scathing talk, cruel one-upmanship, and a relentless digging into sexual secrets...
...Right at the point where his other movies grind their protagonists into terminal despair, his new film goes in a different direction- goes sideways, if you will, allowing its schlubby Everyman a sudden, sweet chance at redemption...
...He's a wine snob...
...But it is also poetic-animated, Payne insists, by the same impulses that animate poetry, love, and all other crazed passions...
...but instead, what you get is Miles, an angst-ridden nebbish, and Jack, a pathological philanderer...
...Quaffable," he opines over a glass of Pinot Noir...
...but even nicer to see one already blessed with style develop a heart...
...His former good looks have coarsened, and he knows it...
...the question turns out to be "Why are you so into Pinot...
...even doing the crossword puzzle as he drives-propping it across the steering wheel...
...Payne has endless fun with such pretensions...
...but when he starts talking wine, his self-consciousness vanishes entirely, leaving him free to ruminate-on wines, the cosmos, and the meaning of life...
...Such particular, sympathetic accuracies are a way to rescue character from caricature...
...His active face flashes with bitterness, glee, self-loathing, dread, and even fleeting joy, while physically he creates a complex orchestration of nervous habits and tics-for instance, crossing and then uncrossing his arms in sheer nervousness when Maya approaches in a restaurant to say hello...
...And character, as Payne has commented in interviews, "is all about the details...
...Whole swaths of American life-where people find the right mix of dreaming and doing, where families function and careers afford a modicum of fulfillment-remain well off Payne's map...
...What is this morose bullshit...
...Rolfe Kent's sunny up-tempo soundtrack bubbles ironically along, its sixties Italian jazz the quintessence of carefree...
...Payne and his regular collaborator, screenwriter Jim Taylor, aren't simply making fun of the Napa Weltanschauung, however...
...In the meantime, he seems to have learned something not particularly technical about how to operate as a filmmaker in Loserland...
Vol. 131 • December 2004 • No. 22
