Sideways

From the desk of The Movie Snob:

Sideways (B+). In About Schmidt, director Alexander Payne painted a portrait of what you might call “retirement crisis,” as Jack Nicholson tried to find some meaning in life after he retires from his bland white-collar job and his wife passes away. In his new movie, Sideways, Payne turns the clock back a few decades and goes after a more familiar malady—the midlife crisis. Best friends Jack (Thomas Haden Church, Spider-Man 3) and Miles (Paul Giamatti, Win Win, wonderful as always) head off for a weeklong vacation in California’s wine country before Jack’s wedding. Jack is a hedonistic doofus, while Miles is a soulful loser: he’s been divorced and depressed for two years, he’s an alcoholic, he’s bored with his job as a middle-school English teacher, and he’s about to give up hope of ever getting his monstrously huge novel published. In short, he’s a failure before the age of 40, and he knows it. Jack and Miles are counterbalanced by two women they meet early in their travels, Stephanie (Sandra Oh, TV’s Grey’s Anatomy) and Maya (Virginia Madsen, A Prairie Home Companion), and it is soon clear that Maya represents Miles’s chance at redemption, if only he could pull himself together long enough to take it. The whole movie is good, but the scenes with Miles and Maya really click. Definitely worth a look.