Wine Film Review - Sideways

During the semester I kept hearing references to the movie Sideways and I somehow had a feeling I’d seen it before.  As it turns out, it was a movie I’d seen parts of before and I went ahead and watched the full movie this morning.  On watching it, I had a couple of key observations.  First, the movie isn’t really about wine at all—although wine is a central component of the movie.  Second, I have a very different impression of this movie after taking a semester-long course on wine.  I also guess I should say that the movie had something of a nostalgic value for me.  My first visit to California some fifteen years ago was to the Central Coast and many of the scenes in the movie bring back great memories.

            The movie follows a week-long journey of two-middle aged men, Miles and Jack, played by Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church, respectively.  Jack is preparing to get married and his college roommate Miles treats him to one last “get away” wine-tasting trip before his upcoming wedding.  The two drive from San Diego, stopping at Miles’ mother’s house, on their way to the Central Coast.  During the stop, there’s a telling scene where Miles steals money from his mother on her birthday.  From that point on, it becomes pretty clear that Miles is something of a pathetic character.  On arriving in Santa Barbara County, Miles aims to introduce his old friend Jack to wine and wine culture.  Jack however is more interested pursuing women in his “last week of freedom” than learning about wine.  It doesn’t take long for Jack to meet a local wine guide played by Sandra Oh and Miles reconnects with a local waitress played by Virginia Madsen who he’d known from previous visits to the Central Coast.  What follows are hilarious episodes of wine drinking, golf playing, and other activities that ultimately lead to Jack question whether he should go forward with his wedding scheduled for the following week.  Miles on the other hand is fixated on his ex-wife who he finds out during that week has remarried, struggles to romantically connect with the local waitress, and generally struggles to come to terms feelings personal and professional inadequacy.     

            Wine is definitely a central component of this movie.  Miles is clearly a knowledgeable wine connoisseur, but spectacularly unsuccessful in other aspects of his life.  Miles uses many of the wine tasting descriptors and techniques that I’ve come to be very familiar with after a semester-long course on wine.  Miles displays a famous disdain for Merlot in the movie that apparently has since had an effect on popularity of the varietal here in the U.S.  The two female supporting characters, Maya and Stephanie, are also very knowledgeable about wine.  In fact, there is a telling scene where Maya describes to Jack how she became such a wine enthusiast—particularly why she feels that wines are living creatures that experience the inevitable rise and decline that all other living creatures experience.  It was a vivid description that brought home many of themes that we covered in class about how wines evolve over time.  There was also hilarious scene where Miles gets in an altercation with a wine-guide and then drinks an entire bucket of spit-bucket wine to show his displeasure with the wine-guide.  I didn’t really feel that movie went into any real depth on the wines produced at the location where the movie was made.  There are several mentions in the movie about the characters getting chances to taste grapes from local vineyards.  With regards to wine knowledge, Jack is the perfect foil to Miles.  Jack is an actor who knows nothing about wine.  He makes hilarious attempts to mask his lack of knowledge.  You appreciate these attempts because you realize that you were making many of the same empty observations about wine before actually making an attempt to learn about wine. 

            All and all, it is easy to see why this was such a critically acclaimed movie.  I found that the name of the movie was most telling about what the central theme of the movie was.  That is, that life often takes us on circuitous routes and in the case of Miles, those routes can end in failure and personal and professional disappointment.  In Jack’s case, he had to come to grips with a fading acting career and a likely chronic proclivity to infidelity.  Given the flaws apparent in these lead characters, I did not find that the movie took the easy way out and used wine as an escape valve for these characters.  That said, Miles does exhibit signs of alcoholism and drug dependence and Jack appears to have clinical sex addiction.  I found that Miles’s wine expertise was one of the few areas of his life where he found real self-esteem.  Not only that, it doesn’t appear that Miles has ever really made any money and in spite of that, he was still able to amass an impressive knowledge of wine.  So I guess you could say that wine is a central backdrop of this intelligent and humorous character analysis of the human condition.