After 20 years, 'Sideways' has aged like a fine . . . well, you know

Alexander Payne brings his 2004 classic to Wisconsin Film Festival

(Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church in “Sideways.”)

You want to talk about a movie having an impact on the world? Many fans of Alexander Payne’s “Sideways” know that merlot sales plummeted after the 2004 film was released, featuring Paul Giamatti’s oenophile Miles dissing the red in a memorably profane line.

Less well-known is that sales of Miles’ wine of choice, the fussy pinot noir, shot up after “Sideways” was a hit. So much so that, to keep up with demand, wineries started growing pinot noir grapes in less-than-ideal locations, causing the quality of pinot noir wine to drop. It’s only in the last year, 20 years after “Sideways” was released, that pinot noir wine has recovered.

Based on a wonderful 20th-anniversary screening of “Sideways” at Madison’s Barrymore Theatre last week as part of the Wisconsin Film Festival, with director/co-writer Payne in attendance, the movie has lost none of its appeal. Unlike a lot of comedies from previous generations whose misbehaving male characters seem less appealing in retrospect, “Sideways” has aged like a fine . . . well, you know.

I hadn’t seen the movie since I originally saw it in theaters in 2004, and remembered how well-acted it was. I remembered how moving and thoughtful Payne and Jim Taylor’s screenplay was, deconstructing the fragile male ego and its penchant for self-sabotage. And, of course, I remembered the “fucking merlot.”

But, seeing “Sideways” for the first time since it premiered in 2004, I had forgotten just how pound-for-pound funny that movie is. “Sideways” has big laughs from start to finish, not just in the zingy dialogue or the pitch-perfect characterizations, but hilarious visual gags like a naked M.C. Gainey chasing Paul Giamatti’s Miles down the street, or the scene where Thomas Haden Church’s Jack tries to rig Miles’ Saab to hit a tree (it’s a long story), only to have the car miss the tree and drive into a ditch.

“Sideways” seems like a throwback to a time when movie studios all had their own independent divisions in the ‘00s like Fox Searchlight and Paramount Vantage, and put some resources behind their indie films. They believed they could make crossover hits that would have the depth of independent films but play to big audiences.  

It was really fun to see “Sideways” with an engaged crowd of hundreds in a sparkling new DCP print supervised by Payne. And Payne, who did a post-show Q&A with UW Cinematheque director Jim Healy, seemed to agree, although he wouldn’t have predicted it would be such an enduring hit.

“During the process of making a film, I’m the one who most knows what it is or what it could be,” Payne said. “Once it’s released, and people see it, I’m the one who knows least about what it is. It doesn’t belong to me anymore. People say to me, ‘Oh, it was so good.’ ‘Really? Why?’”

(Payne, left, and UW Cinematheque director Jim Healy talk about “Sideways” at the 2024 Wisconsin Film Festival.)

In person, the Omaha-based Payne is very witty and dry in a Midwestern way. When an audience member went on a tangent about how he thought (incorrectly) that George Clooney was miscast in Payne’s follow-up, “The Descendants,” Payne didn’t take umbrage, instead calmly deconstructing the fan’s opposition to Clooney in the role.

Payne knows casting. In fact, he said Fox Searchlight wanted Clooney to play the aging soap opera star Jack in “Sideways” (which I can sort of picture) and Edward Norton to play the pretentious Miles (which I cannot see at all). But Payne and his producers stuck to their guns, knowing that they had found their Miles and Jack in auditioning Giamatti and Church.

Part of the reason “Sideways” has aged so well is its perfect casting. Miles and Jack do some pretty awful, selfish things over the course of the movie, but they’re more pathetic than mean. Miles can be snotty and needy, but Giamatti shows that underlying the pretension is real sadness and self-loathing – there’s nothing you can say about Miles that he hasn’t already said to himself a dozen times in the bathroom mirror.

And, at the opposite end, Church’s Jack is such a clueless horndog, an arrested adolescent who skates through life on charm and smarm. To stay mad at him would be like staying mad at your dog for bringing a rabbit carcass into the house.

“Sideways” knows exactly who these flawed guys are, and gives them their comeuppance (a broken car, a broken nose) without judging them too harshly. And it balances them against two warm, richly-drawn characters in Virginia Madsen’s Maya and Sandra Oh’s Stephanie. If Maya is willing to consider forgiving Miles, then he just might be redeemable in our eyes as well. (Even if we don’t concur with her opinion of his unpublished novel.)

In the 20 years since “Sideways” was released, the movie has spawned several wines, a Japanese remake, and a reportedly-in-the-works Broadway musical. Payne said former Hollywood Reporter film critic Kirk Honeycutt is working on a book on the making of the film, and the DCP print in Madison hopefully means it will finally be released on Blu-ray and 4K. 

It’s just too good a film not to uncork again.