It’s a movie everyone loves, so it doesn’t matter what Manny Face says. Know what I mean?
Just look “Sideways” up in Wikipedia and see the shitload of awards it won, including one Oscar – for Best Adapted Screenplay. On the big screen in 2004, it was the major breakthrough for three of the four actors playing the movie’s main roles.
Manny Face watched it on the Internet, at home.
Two former college roommates turned lifelong friends drive out into California wine country for a week’s worth of drinking. Miles Raymond, two years divorced, childless, and a heretofore failed writer, is taking his smalltime actor buddy, Jack Cole, who will be getting married by the week’s end, on this trip, where Miles has envisioned days filled with wine tasting, hanging out in restaurants, and playing golf, as a sort of bachelors’ last time together and farewell.
But Jack wants to get laid. And he does, having the rugged good looks and carefree attitude of an actor – something Manny Face can understand; this part of the movie was true.
But Jack also gets muddled with the broad he beds, and begins seriously rethinking his marriage for a possible life out in wine country with this woman, whom he thinks he loves. But then things get really out of hand and Jack is ultimately forced to back down from his sexual fantasies and return to his fiancée, who is none the worse for the lies Jack told to save their future.
Well, and at the same time, Miles meets Maya – and the two couples double date.
Miles finds out his former wife is pregnant with her new husband’s child, which absolutely devastates him, but in the end is saved by the prospect of a relationship with the hot, cool Maya, which he’s done nothing to bring about except put on the ‘feel sorry for me’ act.
Jack has had his last fling and will be getting married. Miles has also been to bed with Maya, and after his many life’s failures will be redirecting his attentions toward her, as a new beginning, after she gives him the green light.
Happy ending all around.
But Manny Face couldn’t stand the main character – Miles, played by Paul Giamatti – and thinks he didn’t deserve even what he did get at the end, being such a pathetic loser, especially in the looks department.
You see, in the end, even though his 800-page manuscript for a novel gets rejected for publication – I believe it’s his third writing attempt and failure – he wins the hot tomato, Maya, played by Virginia Madsen, and for Manny Face, this reward is senseless. What the fuck does she see in him, even if she does find him to be some kind of deep, sensitive and highly talented writer who’s suffered and has been getting life’s nightmarishly recurring bad break. So what?
This part, this ending, comes straight out of movieland.
Life doesn’t work this way. Things don’t turn around just as they seem to be going the worst. There are no happy endings. If you lose, you lose all the way. Know what I mean?
Does anybody out there have the guts to make a movie that shows a loser, just like the one in this film, taking his loser life to its bitter end, with nothing good happening – because he’s a loser – and without resorting to tricks, like admitting he’s a loser, to gain the sympathy of the woman he wants?
And why does she want him – why?! It doesn’t make sense. There is absolutely nothing in the film that can possibly convincingly explain what the sexy, voluptuous Maya sees in the incredibly pathetic, balding, flabby, borderline-alcoholic, jellylike Miles – dreamy, romantic name notwithstanding.
He is unhealthy, crabby, temperamental, spoiled, whiny, neurotic, depressive, with no real-man qualities whatsoever, but doesn’t appear to have such a bad life after all if he just had the guts to jettison the delusion that he’s some kind of writer. He wants things, but he shows no desire to change to become a better person, which may help him get the things he wants. He expects them to come to him on their own.
Yet in the end, this is exactly what happens, as she beckons to him. Why?! It makes no sense. What’s the point? To show that the beautiful woman comes to the loser, too?
And what if she hadn’t? In real life, does she? No, of course not! It doesn’t work that way.
But here, we are to believe that after the major failure that is his life, she will nurture him, caress his balding head in her lap and soothe his nerves, tell him she understands and everything will be all right, and what a cool, deep, hip and truly profound and wonderful man he really is.
I say, just end it, end it – that’s right – end it! Or show the sod driving his car off a cliff – or something. Shock value. Give me a movie so utterly depressing, it ignites my rage into a credo – that I will never be this guy.
Manny Face admits he wouldn’t find the ‘loser gets the woman in the end’ theme so irritating if the woman wasn’t so damn hot.
Overall, Manny Face liked this flick because it’s simple and stays with the basics, like ambition, desire, the need for companionship and sex, dealing with aging, failure, feeling like a loser, and making alternative plans for getting on with your life if what you’ve been working so hard to achieve doesn’t pan out – if the world tells you it doesn’t want you or what you have to give it – which so often, and more often than not, is the case. It’s about reaching that point when you say to yourself, lying, that you didn’t really want that anyway – that object of desire – fame, fortune, recognition, respect, the good life. You say to yourself – ‘That’s not what’s most important; there are other things in life that have much greater value…’
Yeah, right!
There is the sustained frustration of rejection, the drinking and near-alcoholism to take the edge off, the horror of finding yourself in middle age with nothing to show for it and the terror of what lies ahead if the things you’re doing don’t radically change the direction your life has taken.
Know what I mean?
Manny Face, August 13, 2013