Sideways (2005) Movie Review, Cast & Crew, Film Summary

A mixed experience. When concentrating on its central anti-hero, the film is swell; Paul Giamatti makes his dolorous, asocial character understandable. That far, is is an affecting portrait with a lot of truth to it (my favorite struggling writer-ism was the soon-to-be-father-in-law saying he only likes non-fiction; yeah, if I had a nickel for every time some blowhard’s said that to me I’d have…a few nickels). Whenever it moved beyond him, it was on much less stable ground; for the great acting they received – and the acting is great – the main supporting characters, Tom Hayden Church’s drippy poonhound and Virginia Madsen’s middle-aged-guy’s-fantasy, could have had their characters outlined on the back of a matchbook. The asinine style aimed for and struck Middling Art Movie right in the centre, the sort of dead-pan soft-jazz-scored faux-class that The Simpsons parodied so well in “22 Short Films About Springfield”. Alexander Payne’s irritating fondness of picking on little old ladies and blue collar people was rife. The film’s character-based comedy was often sharp and laugh-out-loud funny – particularly the golf course scene – and the film on many occasions felt close to a good French melancholy comedy. But it kept doing itself in by trying too hard to be whimsical, and dramatically speaking, jumped the shark with the strained, utterly superfluous comedy of sneaking back to get the wallet, and the subsequent car-crashing; silly, silly, silly.