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Back in the glorious Seventies, when I was still being driven around everywhere, I made a connection between music and a place that stuck with me. I was in the family Buick, riding home to the LA suburbs from Santa Barbara -- from a wedding, in fact -- and Steely Dan came on the FM radio. Their smooth, meticulously produced, jazz-flavored pop struck me as the perfect soundtrack to that picture-perfect stretch of coast.
I thought of that moment last night while watching Sideways, Alexander Payne's wine-women-and-song comedy set in the Santa Ynez Valley, just north and inland of Santa Barbara. Its soundtrack is more jazz and less pop than the stuff I latched onto at 14, but the tone is similar: sophisticated but relaxed, upbeat but not driven, and smooth as the rolling hills. The music also matches Payne's filmmaking, which lifted me up on a cloud of laughs and seamless shot sequences until suddenly two hours and three minutes had gone by. But what makes Sideways worth the ride, even if you don't treasure memories or fantasies of California's Central Coast, is that underneath its unruffled surface it's about the roughest spots in life -- or at least the lives of middle-class and upper-middle-class Californians whose greatest fear is a life without meaning. Miles (Paul Giamatti), a middle-school English teacher and unpublished novelist, drives up from San Diego to join college buddy Jack (Thomas Haden Church) for a week roaming among wineries and playing golf. who's about to be married. Lecherous Jack wants to savor his freedom while helping his divorced friend rekindle his love life. Both of them "take it to the limit," as another easygoing California band once did, but then go well beyond, which is what gives Sideways a humor and bite that belies its sunny premise. Not everyone will see themselves in their stories, or in the stories of the two divorced women they meet, Maya (Virginia Madsen) and Stephanie (Sandra Oh). But this is a story about real life, about what happens when your books go unpublished and your marriage fails, or when you have to reach for happiness even when you know the odds are against you.
Payne brilliantly taps into the Seventies for the look of the film, with lens flare, sunset silhouettes, and even extreme zooms. But the heart of the film is the uproarious verbal humor of the screenplay and, above all, the outstanding performances by all four leads. Giamatti's sad-sack character is nuanced, Madsen makes Maya complicated and deep, Oh turns on her comic charm, and Church does the tough work of playing a bad actor well.