This fall, after a couple years of trying to mind my own business, I took a few halting steps toward the community of movie critics. I spent a few days at the Toronto film festival, joined the Chicago Film Critics Association, and accepted an invitation to vote in the annual Village Voice poll. And I liked Alexander Payne’s Sideways, whose endorsement by a multitude of critics’ polls has caused my colleague Jonathan Rosenbaum such consternation.
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Even less mysterious is the critical backlash against the movie now that so many have praised it. Critics are contrarian by nature, and Michael Atkinson of the Voice seemed to sum up the rap against Sideways when he labeled it “the year’s most hallowed schlub wet dream . . . a forgivable favorite for self-pitying menopausal Charlie Browns–be they critics or pear-shaped civilians–hoping against all rationality that Virginia Madsen awaits on a dusk-bathed hillside, ready to get drunk and screw.” Equating people who like the movie with its seriously flawed protagonist is a transparent tactic, and assuming that Payne applauds those flaws is even less defensible. Are people who like Citizen Kane megalomaniacs? If I were a better person, I might have rejected Sideways, a solipsistic comedy about an unpublished novelist who finds love with an incredibly fine woman, in favor of the Voice poll’s number-one film, Before Sunset, a solipsistic drama about a published novelist who finds love with an incredibly fine woman.
During his vacation he meets Maya (Madsen), who shares his love of fine wine but knows the difference between having good taste and being a good person. When Miles talks about wine he’s really talking about himself: “Pinot needs constant care and attention and in fact can only grow in specific little tucked-away corners of the world. . . . Only when someone has taken the time to truly understand its potential can pinot be coaxed into its fullest expression.” When Maya talks about wine she looks outward: “I like to think about what was going on the year the grapes were growing. . . . I think about all those people who tended and picked the grapes, and if it’s an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I love how wine continues to evolve, how every time I open a bottle it’s going to taste different than if I had opened it on any other day.” By the end of the movie Miles finally understands that he can realize his potential only by opening himself up to the world, and the final shot, of his hand knocking at someone’s door, is the most exquisitely hopeful I saw in a movie all year.
Zach Braff’s Garden State.
Sideways.
When I submitted my Voice ballot I forgot to vote for the year’s best undistributed films–an unforgivable goof, because these movies need the exposure a lot more than Sideways does. My four days in Toronto were enough to remind me that many great movies–like Todd Solondz’s Palindromes and Cate Shortland’s Somersault, both of which screened there–have to fight like hell for a U.S. release. Three others that deserve to open on a thousand screens are Susanne Bier’s painful Danish drama Open Hearts, James Miller’s heroic Middle East documentary Death in Gaza, and Danny Schechter’s media muckraker Weapons of Mass Deception.
