Drinking, Driving and No Seat Belts: Sideways
Billed as a friends’ road trip through wine country, a comedy; this is no live, life, love with wine sniffing and swilling. Instead, it’s one of the bleakest films I’ve ever watched. While there are laughs, it’s very very dark comedy, almost painful at times. We laugh at the horror of the characters’ experiences, probably glad that it’s them, instead of us.
Two friends set off for a bachelor road trip pre-wedding day around wine country in California. We see them visiting various vineyards, the best man Miles (Paul Giamatti) appreciating the wine, and his friend, the groom, just slurping it up, appreciating the views instead. Sometimes there’s golf and good food!
All is not well. The groom-to-be Jack (Thomas Haden Church) wants rescuing from his future in-laws, gleefully disconnects from his future wife at the first opportunity, and clearly prefers women with their wine to vitner pedagogy.
What we become bystanders to is the disintegration of a friendship, the breaking of trust, plans and expectations, the breaking of hearts — betrayal. By the end, we have one friend realising that they don’t like their friend very much any more and walking away horrified at what they’ve been a party to, almost disassociating. Unlike a drama like The Holdovers, this is relentlessly bleak with a few bright moments, many excruciating ones, and a hopeful ending feeling grafted on at the end.
At the beginning of the movie, one friend (Miles) is grieving and almost in denial about his divorce. Turns out his friend Jack knows a life-changing secret about his friend’s ex-wife Victoria (Jessica Hecht) that he hasn’t shared. When he does, his friend spends a lot of time trying to win his ex-wife back, but it’s too late. Then he starts to fret about his new baby, his future novel, and whether the publisher will infact go ahead and publish it.
The groom is an actor, sliding around the small-scale of things, and fleeing his imminent life commitment with abandon. He almost seems to be in denial about what his marriage will mean.
Meanwhile, the future groom can’t take his eyes off of the women who are not his wife to be, and ends up escalating a relationship with Stephanie (Sandra Oh). And when we encounter them from the other friend’s point of view, you too will say ‘OH!’ He ignores his future wife, playing voicemail tag, and despises his future in-laws generousity and gifts, giving gifted golf clubs to his friend. Instead he pretty soon ends up wandering off doing his own hedonistic and reality denying thing, and playing at relationships and family. As Miles observes, when he said the lines he probably believed them — but Jack treats real life like a script.
Seemingly pushing his friend back into dating and relationships, helping, Jack and Miles double date with a waitress friend Maya (Virginia Madsen) and her friend Stephanie (Sandra Oh). Though more and more this looks like a more mired smoke screen for his friend being with Stephanie, and becomes a personal rejection of their road trip idea. Instead, Miles is left alone or even kicked out of their shared accommodation, so that the groomsman can be with Stephanie. More worryingly, he’s started to father/uncle her child and fully involve himself with her life pretty quickly, imagining a committed life together.
But hell hath no fury like a Sandra Oh scorned! Romance and a relationship develops with Maya — they enjoy talking, thinking and reading — until Miles lets slip that his friend has an upcoming unmissable date. Both the relationships are dead, and the groomsman now sports a horribly broken nose, and lots of hospital tape. Ofcourse, despite all of this, Jack now decides to go ahead with his wedding regardless, until he meets another waitress…and then her husband, leaving the personalised, treasured wedding rings behind — along with all of his clothes and wallet. In a truly horrible moment, the rings are retrieved, and then Jack trashes his Miles’s car to prove that his ‘accident’ was due to a car crash. And not due to the crash of an angry lover’s handbag.
Worse still, the novel is rejected, and remains unpublished. The writer stares and stares at his friend as his best man wondering what on earth they’ve become. Seeing the wedding going ahead with seeming unity and vows of commitment is horrible — we feel deeply for the betrayed bride and wife. Who is she connecting herself with?
The only decent guy is Victoria’s new husband Ken. Whilst laughably named after a sexless doll, he’s the only man with mature emotions and behaviour in this movie. He’s secure and kind enough to allow his wife space and time to speak with her ex-husband, to respect her privacy — and to trust her. They have, by her admission, a mutually loving, respectful relationship.
The writer reconnects his relationship through his writing being read — and himself. But we wonder if, all along, he’s been comparing himself to his friend, and how he uses his words to enchant and impress. All Miles can feel is his failure and lack of achievement, his mundane ordinariness, his losses. He even copies his friend’s behaviour and use of words — lying to him outright about how news of his imminent wedding day got shared — and blaming others. When left alone, he turns to porn, erotica and even a version of Cosmo for a women’s perspective on male sexuality. However, is this him — or is he doing what his friend would do? After all his friend’s focus is on sex, and encouraging him to do the same.
For we see how they both stand on marriage and vows. One friend mourns the loss of his wife, marriage, really values it and wants the relationship, he marriage, his wife, back. When he does go into a new relationship, it’s with care, respect and privacy — even their love scene is shot in an Old Hollywood way, cutting away. Jack meanwhile wriggles like they’ve been hooked and are being reeled in, finding opportunity after opportunity to be with other women, denying any responsibility for their actions, and eventually goes into the marriage with Christina (Alysia Reiner), because they’ve lost all other options. They neither value marriage, nor their wife — and the grief we see them experiencing at the end seems to be for the loss of other women, other opportunities. Maybe they feel some guilt for what they’ve done, but it seems not — after all, they couldn’t even remember to grab the rings when they fled the scene of discovery.
It’s easy to go judgy on these two, but we see everything from their point of view. In a sense, we are them. Miles (and us) reels from grief to grief and despair to despair; Jack lives buoyantly for being desired by women and to cover up them really thinking about their lives and where they’re going, what they’re doing. Jack lives to look and be looked at. A scene where a mother’s birthday is celebrated in a frankly tatty way so that the son can rob his mother of her savings to fund their road trip cuts to the quick. (The son has a teaching job so I’m not sure why they need extra — you have to wonder what they’re spending on, or maybe the wage is low). Can we trust either of the characters we inhabit?
At the end, though their teacher is bored, we see a class engaged and seemingly ready to learn. Miles can’t appreciate this or his role in bringing the material to life; all he can see is his own personal doom in the words being read out. His angry girlfriend Maya reconnects with him because she’s understood who he is by reading his novel, and she likes to talk and think, taking time. We end with a thought about knowing and being known — but it feels clunkily appended and unlikely, given the hopelessness of what we’ve seen before.
Enjoyed reading this article?! Support my writing at: https://ko-fi.com/susanadventuresinculture
