Photo: Alexander Payne's Sideways
More than anything, Sideways furthers the impression that Alexander Payne is a great structuralist filmmaker. Along with his writing partner Jim Taylor, Payne creates pitch-perfect paeans to American character and eccentricity, and there's a sublime literary quality to his characters' speech and physical rhythms where word and action are soulfully intertwined. For example, when frustrated novelist Miles (Paul Giamatti)—off for a week-long excursion to California wine country with his lothario actor friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church)—describes a Pinot grape as "thin skinned [and] temperamental" his character comes, ever so subtly, into crystal clear focus. It's the kind of writing that certain people, blinded by its mechanistic perfection, like to applaud: pointed, revealing, and, quite frankly, totally fucking obvious. All of Payne's films are, more or less, an accumulation of such perfect character moments as these. They're like Screenplay 101 classes taught by René Descartes: Individual components (e.g. characterization, photography, music) are polished to within an inch of their life and then assembled into the most pleasing piece of bric-a-brac you ever did see. Keith Uhlich
More than anything, Sideways furthers the impression that Alexander Payne is a great structuralist filmmaker. Along with his writing partner Jim Taylor, Payne creates pitch-perfect paeans to American character and eccentricity, and there's a sublime literary quality to his characters' speech and physical rhythms where word and action are soulfully intertwined. For example, when frustrated novelist Miles (Paul Giamatti)—off for a week-long excursion to California wine country with his lothario actor friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church)—describes a Pinot grape as "thin skinned [and] temperamental" his character comes, ever so subtly, into crystal clear focus. It's the kind of writing that certain people, blinded by its mechanistic perfection, like to applaud: pointed, revealing, and, quite frankly, totally fucking obvious. All of Payne's films are, more or less, an accumulation of such perfect character moments as these. They're like Screenplay 101 classes taught by René Descartes: Individual components (e.g. characterization, photography, music) are polished to within an inch of their life and then assembled into the most pleasing piece of bric-a-brac you ever did see. Keith Uhlich
