Film Review: Sideways

Director: Alexander Payne

The 2004 Academy Award Winner for Best Adapted Screenplay is a little gem of a film about growing old believing you have failed, all the great plans of what you would do with your life when you are young have passed you by. Writer and director Alexander Payne has an impressive record in working on films like Election, About Schmidt and more recently The Descendants.

Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti) is an unsuccessful writer and wine expert who teaches English in San Diego who decides to travel around the wine regions of Southern California with his college friend Jack Cole (Thomas Haden Church). Jack is due to be married in around a weeks time so is seeing the trip as more of an opportunity to have one last fling before settling down. They meet up with two women both with varying degrees of success and begin to learn a lot about what they truly want in life.

Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti) and Jack Cole (Thomas Haden Church)

The film is beautifully shot around the Californian wine region as a road movie that sees them move from cheap motel to cheap motel. Like About Schmidt, it centres around a man whose unhappy with his life and considers how he can change things for the better. The character of Miles Raymond almost lives in a bubble as he shuns personal relationships and the adventurous side of life to live a quiet existence in San Diego. His best friend is someone he appears to have little in common with and that produces most of the strife and comedy within the movie.

Giamatti and Haden Church work very well together as there different outlooks on life collide during one wine tasting trip. The scene with the spit bucket at the wine tasting is hilarious and a little poke at the pretentious nature of the wineries that they are visiting. The film moves into a more slapstick comedy when Miles is summoned to collect a wallet that Jack has left at a womens house after being chased out. Overall its a film that ticks a lot of boxes as a comedy, drama and life affirming film.

3.5/4 Caring yet funny portrayal of middle aged life.