Forward Alexander Payne takes a step in the right direction BY STEVE VINEBERG
	Sideways Directed by Alexander Payne. Written by Payne and Jim Taylor. With Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, and Sandra Oh. A Fox Searchlight release (123 minutes). At the Avon and Jane Pickens..
	No Payne, no gain Alexander Payne, the director of Citizen Ruth, Election, and About Schmidt, has returned with his best film to date, Sideways, a brilliant revival of that most disreputable of genres, the buddy movie. When I ask Payne whether there was a moment in Rex Pickett’s source novel that made him want to make it into a film, he replies, "Not that made me want me to make it, but that opened me to the possibility of the rest of it. I really wanted to do that scene where Miles steals the wallet from that couple fucking. I thought that would be really fun to direct. I mean, that’s high comedy." This scene features a cameo appearance by George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. I ask Payne what it means. "Nothing. It’s just an utter coincidence that our president and our secretary of defense happen to appear at the scene of greatest degradation in the movie. And regime change does begin at home." With its loose road-movie structure and split-screen interlude, Sideways has a genuine ’70s vibe. Payne observes, "I don’t want the film to be seen as nostalgic at all, it’s not an homage. But I do know that I wanted to be a film director largely because of the movies I saw when I was a teenager, which were simply human, character-driven films with flawed protagonists — not flawed protagonists, just human beings — and where the worth of cinema is measured by its proximity to actual life rather than its distance from actual life. It’s not far-off escapist-fantasy commercial fare, which is fraudulent. It’s seeking to be real, about real life on this planet. "And about Americans. Since the ’70s, we have American movies but we don’t have movies about Americans. And I just think it’s time now, especially when we have hairy political situations and there’s an increasing divide in the country, and there’s an increasing sense of alienation of the individual from society. You saw that in American films of the ’70s. You had a cinema of alienation, movies that sought not to confirm the status quo but to challenge the status quo, and we need that again. For sure, in a huge way." So were there moments in making Sideways at which he felt the temptation to be fraudulent? "That’s a really interesting question, and I actually wish I could think of an example, because it would be instructive, certainly to me. But in general, I always think that the audience has a greater sensitivity to the truth than I do. I always accuse myself of being somehow faker than an audience will be. I accuse myself of being less intelligent than the audience is. And I’m always trying to make myself smarter, quicker, better, because I think the audience is going to think I’m a dumb shit if I don’t." Was he ever tempted, for example, to play the womanizing Jack as a caricature? "You have to fight that. ’Cause that would be too easy. And actually not interesting. I always want to fight to defend my characters’ complexity. And often where that battle takes place is in editing. ’Cause on the script level, we try to get it all in there. Jim Taylor, my co-writer, and I spend a lot of time on the dialogue, and I tell the actors I’d like it recited exactly as written, ’cause sometimes there are little things sewn in, precisely in order to have contradictions and paradoxes. But then sometimes in editing, the studio will say, ‘The movie’s running too long, why don’t you remove that scene or this scene?’ And even my editor, with good intentions and good heart, will say, ‘This scene is too talky, we can lose this and this.’ And that’s where I have to be very protective. A lot can go out the window. I certainly am directing the actors always to be as real as possible." — Chris Fujiwara

It was clear from his first two pictures, Citizen Ruth and Election, that writer/director Alexander Payne had a gleeful wit and the steady aim of a master barb thrower. There wasn’t a heartfelt moment in either of these comedies; there wasn’t meant to be. But though his last, About Schmidt, received glowing reviews and Oscar nominations, Payne’s smart-ass, freestyle brand of clowning curdled the story of a newly widowed retiree (Jack Nicholson) going on the road and acquiring a fresh perspective on his life. Payne and his regular co-writer, Jim Taylor, didn’t seem to know how to handle the mixed tone of the material; the sentimental sections wound up sounding smug, and the whole project took on an unpleasant air of misanthropy.

What’s so surprising about Payne’s latest, Sideways, is that it is heartfelt. It’s an alternately rollicking and mournful road comedy about the terrors of settling into middle age that takes place during a week-long vacation taken by two men, pals since college, in Southern California wine country. Jack (Thomas Haden Church) is due to be married right after they return home, so Miles (Paul Giamatti) has devised this trip as a male-bonding ritual centered on golf, good food, and Miles’s hobby, wine tasting. But Jack has other ideas: he wants to enjoy his last vestiges of sexual freedom, and he hopes that Miles, who has sunk into a miserable reclusiveness since his own marriage broke up, can get laid too and loosen up a little. The movie contrasts Jack, whose fear that he’s throwing away his youth makes him behave like a frat boy, with Miles, whose marital and professional frustrations (he’s stuck teaching middle-school English and hasn’t had any success shopping around his mammoth first novel) have exacerbated his worst qualities — obstinacy, snobbery, self-involvement, and a tendency to be judgmental.

Church, who was Lowell Mather on the TV series Wings, is hilarious; he gets the one-two punch of Jack’s puerile sensuality and his hang-dog air of abashment whenever he’s chastised. The movie is wise enough to match him up with Payne’s wife, the raucous Korean-Canadian actress Sandra Oh, as Stephanie, whom the men run into pouring at a winery — a good-time gal with a vulnerable heart. But Miles is the protagonist, and Giamatti, in the best movie role he’s had so far, shows us both the depth of this man’s psychic injuries and the defenses and obsessions he’s accumulated. Miles is the walking wounded; he probably always was, but since his life closed in on him with the end of his marriage, he’s equipped himself with a thousand excuses for not finding a way out. Virginia Madsen’s Maya is the warm-blooded waitress who tempts him out of his emotional hibernation. Their scenes together are superb, even the big one Payne and Taylor can’t resist overwriting, where these two aficionados couch their sexual desires and trepidations in a discussion of wine. Every instinct may tell you this dialogue shouldn’t work, but you’re so invested in the characters — in Maya’s willingness to risk another relationship and Miles’s seesaw responses to her openness — that it does.

Payne set out to make a ’70s-style comedy dominated by character and varied in tone, and he and Taylor handle most of the tonal shifts with aplomb. They’re surefooted all the way through the section where the two women (who are friends) find out about Jack’s engagement. The episode that totters is the one where Jack picks up a fleshy one-night stand at a restaurant and, after her husband runs him off, returns with Miles to retrieve his wallet. You can see what the filmmakers are going for here — screwball sex farce — and they come up with a good punch line that treats both the woman and her spouse with generosity. But the extended gag is perhaps too crudely conceived, and it comes at a point in the movie when we’re looking for something more substantial. Yet though this sequence throws off the movie, it doesn’t linger in the mind. Sideways winds up on a tentative, hopeful note as Miles puts his heart on the line one more time. About Schmidt may have catapulted Payne into the ranks of major Hollywood directors, but this is the movie that earns him his place among them.