Sideways

Sideways

2004

Director: Alexander Payne

Writer: Alexander Payne, Rex Rickett, and Jim Taylor.

126 Minutes

Two friends, one more colorful, unique, and flawed than the other, set out for a week in Southern California’s wine country, which changes both of their lives for the better.

Miles (Paul Giamattie) is a depressed 8th grade English teacher and a struggling novelist, while Jack (Thomas Haden Church) is a C-list actor with infidelity problems. Together, they make for a right vs wrong, good vs bad, and screwed up vs really screwed up team trying to have a “great weekend” away. It’s unfortunate that these two define “great weekend” differently.

Miles defines great weekend as food, golf, and wine. Jack defines it as sex, sex, and more sex.

Miles holds marriage in high regards, though Jack simply sees it as a means to the end. This creates conflict, which is two fold for our hero.

Miles's external conflict is getting Jack to his wedding on Saturday, while Jack dabbles in several women along the journey. Yet, Miles's secondary, internal conflict is he's divorced, unable to move on, and is depressed.

Why?

Miles believed his marriage would last forever. He thought he was set for life. He holds his x-wife as such high esteem, where even Jack tries to remind him how imperfect she was.

“She had the best pallet I’ve ever known,” Miles explains, but with hope and love in his voice.

Why can't he move on? Because he cannot let go.

It happens. People hold onto love like old report cards or missing socks, when it’s better to simply throw them away. Though often times, we can’t. We hold onto objects, items, and love because we believed they were the one and only.

They are not.

But, this is true in Miles case. He cannot let go. And in the wake of it, Miles holds onto a rare bottle of wine: 1961 Chateau Cheval Blanc. He was saving it for his wedding anniversary that will never come to light.

And the 1961’s are peeking now.

Miles does make it through the weekend and gets Jack to his wedding, eliminating the external conflict. At the wedding, he runs into his x-wife and her new husband. She tells him he’s pregnant. He’s floored. At this moment, he knows all hope is gone. All love is gone. The hope that sometime his x-wife will realize her mistake and come back is over. Now, he can move on and eliminate the internal conflict.

In the scene above, Miles, having heard the news about his x-wife’s pregnancy, retires to a fast food restaurant with his 1961 Cheval Blanc. He drinks out of a Styrofoam cup, eating a cheeseburger, in the company of no one.

It’s not special, nor significant.

That information [pregnancy] is what he needed to move on with his life. He needed to let that relationship/marriage die before he could move forward. He needed to drink that bottle of wine in order to progress.

His arc was not only getting Jack to the wedding, but getting out of the slump and move onto something better.

And who is better than the beautiful Maya (Virginia Madsen), Miles’s love interest in the film.

All in all, Sideways is a dark comedy about rich characters. No one does it better than Alexander Payne, in that regard. He’s pure genius and unafraid to use real people, real situations, and real problems.

Alexander Payne uses his films to help humans understand humanity.

In the end, that’s why we should go to movies: to understand.