DIRECTED BY Alexander Payne
STARRING Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen
US 2004 126 mins.
RAY ***
DIRECTED BY Taylor Hackford
STARRING Jamie Foxx, Regina King, Aunjanue Ellis, Clifton Powell
US 2004 152 mins.
EACH year, for a month or so, the movie landscape changes. The Oscar nominations are announced, and we get to see films on the big screen that would otherwise have had to wait for video. A biography of Ray Charles – all but unknown to Cypriots under 30 – could never have been a top draw at the multiplex, were it not Oscar-endorsed. And as for Sideways, recipient of five nominations including Best Picture … well, can you really see our cinemas showing a grown-up semi-comedy about a pair of fortyish oenophiles on a tour of the Californian wine country?
“Wow,” marvelled a friend after watching it last week. “Looks like there are still some great directors out there”. That’s the general consensus; indeed, the unanimity with which critics’ groups in the US anointed Sideways Film of the Year came close to provoking a backlash, not to mention barbed comments on how middle-aged critics see themselves in Miles, the pudgy depressive protagonist played by Paul Giamatti. European reviewers have also been ecstatic: “New classics of American cinema don’t come along that often, so grab this one with both hands. It’s an occasion for the singing of hosannas from the roof of every cinema,” wrote Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “Sideways is beautifully written, terrifically acted; it is paced and constructed with such understated mastery that it’s sort of a miracle”.
It sounds like I’m building up the film just to shoot it down, but in fact it’s hard to argue with Sideways; how can you resent a film about ordinary people – losers, to be blunt – that neither demeans them nor panders to the audience by giving them unlikely triumphs? Giamatti starred in another acclaimed comedy, American Splendour a couple of years ago, but that showed the pitfalls of romanticising failure: its hero was also a loser, but sharper and more soulful than the winners around him, earning a well-deserved happy ending. That wasn’t humanism; that was Revenge of the Nerds for adults.
Sideways has a touch of this as well, especially in Virginia Madsen as the smart and tender woman who – unaccountably, one might think – loves self-loathing Miles, listening patiently to his drunken ramblings and humouring his pretensions of being a writer. But director Payne (a Greek-American, né Papadopoulos) finds a fine balance with Miles, cleverly walking a tightrope in showing his hero’s pretensions – born of unhappiness and insecurity – without actually judging him.
On the surface Miles is the Depressive Intellectual, a Woody Allen without the one-liners; there’s a certain glamour in that – and he does know his wines, exalting the Pinot Noir grape (sensitive and temperamental, like himself) and despising the machine-tooled Merlot. Look a little closer, though, and he seems a much less romantic figure – more sleazy, more pathetic.
For a start, does he really know his wines? He can talk the talk, ‘finding’ hints of strawberry, asparagus and cheese as he swirls wine at a tasting, but when he and Madsen open a bottle he just says “Very tasty”, missing the flaws that she (a true connoisseur) picks up right away. In fact, Miles’ cultured jargon is a mere façade for guzzling. He gets drunk on a date, and totally plastered when his novel is rejected. When we meet him, he’s already hung-over. He’s inert, “in a tailspin”, unable to deal with Life. He’s not a wine-snob; he’s an alcoholic.
The film is really about self-delusion. Miles thinks he’s an aesthete just as his friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church) thinks of himself as a celebrity. Jack is a has-been actor, about to get married to a rich wife (the wine-country trip is his ‘last taste of freedom’); he’s upwardly-mobile, yet the film makes it clear he’s deluding himself about his place in the world. He takes up with a lusty local girl – without telling her it’s just a fling, another form of delusion – whose trashy Mum is introduced for the sole purpose of showing us how working-class she is. He spends the movie waiting for the wine-snobs to recognise him from his old TV show – but the only person who does is a waitress in a diner, whom he also promptly shags. We leave him at the altar, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that he’s making a mistake.
The ending isn’t totally open; Miles finds a measure of closure, even happiness. The film could perhaps have been more. It’s smart but a little too diffident, lacking something in impact (I doubt I’ll remember these characters in six months time). Yet Sideways is a gem, and a real surprise: not just the kind of film you seldom find in Cyprus, but the kind of film you seldom find getting Oscar nominations.
Ray, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of film you expect to find at the Oscars: handsome, expensive, two and a half hours long, with a lead performance (by Jamie Foxx) so hotly-tipped to win Best Actor they might as well mail it to him now. Not only is Foxx in almost every scene, not only does he find a body language and set of mannerisms – which, I’ve no doubt, correspond exactly to Ray Charles’ – not only does he go from innocent to junkie to great survivor, but he does all this without using an actor’s greatest weapon: his eyes.
Ray Charles, for those who don’t know, was blind (he died last year, just before the film was released); he was also a legendary musician, a massive star of the 50s and 60s and a notable innovator, straddling many genres – his music variously described as jazz, gospel, country and R&B. He also did a lot of living, shown as a man of immense appetites – for music, for women, and for drugs; he had a mistress and illegitimate child, and was also a heroin addict for nearly 20 years.
That’s a lot of life to cram into 152 minutes, and a certain shorthand is acceptable: thus, for instance, we see Ray as a child learning to ‘listen’ (i.e. use his ears to compensate for his eyes) in the space of one scene – he’s helpless, then two minutes later he’s an expert. Rather than explain the ‘payola’ system, through which DJs got cash for plugging songs on the radio, we see a DJ raving about Ray’s latest song, then a manager sidles up and literally puts money in his pocket. One assumes it didn’t happen quite like that.
Ray stays surface-level, skipping from one part of the life to another. The heroin addiction gets forgotten for a while, then brought to the fore as required by the script. Ray was (apparently) haunted by his brother’s death in childhood, and that gets set up for a while, then shown – then recedes into the background before being recalled at the very end, with a ghostly child asserting “It wasn’t your fault”.
It’s artificial, yet the film entertains. It’s a speeded-up mini-series, with a new year flashing up every few minutes, and it hurtles along like a behind-the-scenes special with added production values. Obviously it’s wrong to equate this conventional movie with the smarter Sideways – they’re at opposite ends of the three-star spectrum – yet in fact, in its own way, it’s just as recommendable. Ray is what’s commonly known as ‘Oscar-bait’, and right now we’re feeling generous when it comes to the Academy. Let’s hear it for the Oscar nominations!
NEW DVD RELEASES
Here’s our regular look at the more interesting titles released on DVD in the US and UK over the past few weeks. Some of these may be available to rent from local video clubs, or you can always order over the Internet: dozens of suppliers, but http://www.amazon.com (for US) and http://www.sendit.com (for UK) are among the most reliable, albeit not the cheapest. Note that US discs are ‘Region 1’, and require a multi-region player.
NEW FILMS
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS: Decent sports movie lifted by the always-great Billy Bob Thornton; includes deleted scenes and a doc on the original true story. [US]
DOWN BY LOVE: Hungarian drama, acclaimed in some quarters – though the transfer is apparently poor. We’ll take what we can get…[US]
VODKA LEMON: Quirky Armenian comedy, for those who missed it (or couldn’t handle Greek subtitles) when it was shown at the Friends of the Cinema Society last month. Includes a 40-minute Making Of. [UK]
THIS SO-CALLED DISASTER: Documentary on the stage production of a Sam Shepard play, starring Sean Penn and Nick Nolte, makes for a fascinating look at the creative process. [US]
OLD FILMS
TOP HAT (1935) and SHALL WE DANCE? (1937): Strange but true: classic Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals aren’t available on DVD in their home country – but who cares, since they’re out on Region 2? Top Hat is better, but Shall We Dance? includes the great ‘Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off’. [UK]
NIGHT AND THE CITY (1950): Tremendous, London-set ‘film noir’ in deluxe new package from the Criterion Collection. [US]
RANDOM HARVEST (1942): Classic tear-jerker, starring Ronald Colman as amnesiac hero; also includes two wartime shorts, Don’t Talk and Marines in the Making. [US]
SEX IN CHAINS (1928): Homosexual love in a German film from 1928? You’d better believe it. [US]
CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, SEASON 3: Semi-improvised fun from the co-creator of Seinfeld. [US]
E.R., SEASON 3: George Clooney’s in it too (I think)! [UK]
