Sideways

The writer-director Alexander Payne and his co-scenarist Jim Taylor are career ironists, drawn by disposition to tells stories not about the usual romanticized heroes and heroines but about protagonists who represent various low-slung estimates of humankind. Their first two movies, Citizen Ruth (1996) and Election (1999), go in for total satire, in which the wrongheaded characters crash into each other like bumper cars--they can't reach their goals or understand why that is. As a result, the usual Hollywood salesmanship that works first and foremost by making you like the characters at all costs never comes into play because the characters' every fantasy, delusion, or outright lie stands out in high relief. To us but not, of course, to them. When the irredeemable title figure scampers off with a bag of money at the end of Citizen Ruth we've had such an unidealized view of her that although we're amazed we feel no urge to cheer. (Unthinkable in Hollywood product like The Italian Job.)

With About Schmidt (2002), in which the protagonist develops a need for consoling revelation so late in life that his habit of living has put it beyond his reach, Payne and Taylor open the irony up a bit. Unlike the relentless, bunker-busting irony of Citizen Ruth and Election, the movie's cruel-funny detachment pauses at the climactic wedding party when Schmidt stands to make a speech. We know he's hoping to save his daughter from a bad marriage but we see both that he isn't capable of forcing a big moment on an unexpecting crowd and that even if he were he wouldn't know what to say. The movie's proportion of irony to agony mirrors the proportion of blindness to insight in Schmidt's life: you laugh, laugh, laugh through the movie, almost as if you were staving off awareness of what it feels like to be without emotional or spiritual resources, but then it can't be put off anymore. That last scene hit me like a sudden intake of icy air. It was as if I'd awakened mid-flight to find that I'd only dreamed the airplane but was nonetheless six miles off the ground.

In Payne and Taylor's new release Sideways, the irony and realism inform each other in an ongoing way new for them. The story unfolds as a realistic recreation of a highly individual road trip: Jack (Thomas Haden Church), an aging, no-longer-successful TV actor, is about to get married to the daughter of a booming immigrant businessman, and so Miles (Paul Giamatti), his old college buddy and now a middle-school English teacher and serious but unpublished novelist, takes him off for a last-week-of-freedom in the Santa Barbara wine country. The irony does its work by preventing their picaresque adventures from being too familiarly cozy. The soft realism of most character-driven movies leads you to expect that Jack and Miles will come to terms with their disappointments as they peak into middle age and that in the process Jack will either decide not to marry his uptight girlfriend or will be confirmed in his love. What you get instead is an ironic remove from the characters in which you aren't gratified by seeing them grow out of their characters to become normal, healthy, and happy (terms generally arrived at by some vague romantic-liberal consensus).