Not So Close
by
Chris Knipp

Patrick Marber (I'm told) pared down his own play to essentials when adapting it to the screen for Mike Nichols in Closer. One can give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that the play was made better, if even nastier, by those "inessentials." Some critics say that. One (the irascible Armond White) calls Nichols "evil" for making the movie, and says it's just a British knockoff of Neil LaBute. Closer does show LaBute's low opinion of the relations between the sexes, but Marber's four criss-crossing adulterers are simply fickle and valueless, rather than possessing the conscious cruelty of LaBute's males. Closer is indeed loathesome, but there's not much there to loathe. What remains is the theatrical effect of dialogue that may have seemed clear on the London stage seven years ago but now sounds clichéd, repetitive, and unreal.

The players are Dan (a weepy Jude Law, whose pretty face goes funny when he cries), Alice (a decorative Natalie Portman), Larry (Clive Owen, strongest of the four) and Anna (a pleasingly recessive Julia Roberts). The two ladies have been given U.S. passports to connect with the Hollywood market. The whole production crosses the line from cool and abstract into simple fake. When successful photographers (Anna is reputed to be one) have shows in movies lately, their work looks like Avedon -- superficially, that is, without the late portraitist's distinction. The result is easy to film but very generic. Unfortunately Julia Roberts and her handlers seem unaware that a handheld 35 mm. camera, whose image is not square, can be and usually is turned sideways for closeups of a face. The script also ignores that a doctor's desk normally doesn't take up more space than his examination table. Or that an aspiring writer might not decide he's a "failed novelist" simply because his first book hasn't sold well.

Somehow the scene in which Ms. Portman -- Alice -- plies trade (lap dancing in the private room of a strip house), though one of the most memorable moments in the movie, seems equally inauthentic: the place and Ms. Portman are too immaculate and perfect for such a situation. In short, there's nothing believable about the sanitized Avedon-esque backgrounds these Hollywooded versions of play characters are given.

It's hard to follow or care about the action. Dan meets Alice, "meets cute," as they say through the crude device of having him present when she's knocked down by a car. She never acquires an identity. We're supposed to believe that this is because she doesn't like hers. Fair enough, but such people do have pasts. Later (we have no idea how much or little time has passed) Dan and Alice are living together. Dan gets his photo done by the famous Anna in connection with his book (nice going for a soon-to-be "failed novelist"), and he kisses her. She won't go out with him, so as revenge he tricks the promiscuous Larry into a cybersex date with her, which delights some viewers; I found it extremely unfunny, as well as unlikely. The joke backfires because Larry and Anna become a couple and eventually marry -- again, we don't quite know when.

What's so tedius about this play-turned-into-a-movie is not that it's all talk (so's Shakespeare, you might say), but because it's all nagging questions. The most flagrant examples are when Larry finds Alice at a strip club and keeps asking what her real name is, and when Larry learns from Anna about an affair with Dan and insists on being told every detail of their sex. If you want to see sexual questionaires done for a real purpose, go to see Kinsey.

"'This is my favorite movie of the year,' I realized," Bay Area food writer Meredith Brody begins a food column -- "as I watched Sideways for the third time with the same sense of delight and pleasure as I had the first time, six weeks earlier, at the Toronto Film Festival." Brody's most certainly not alone, but there are prominent dissenters. Here's Jonathan Rosenbaum, beginning his own annual Ten Best list to explain why Sideways isn't on it: "Ten film critics' polls...have named Sideways the best movie of the year. I don't know whether to laugh or cry... Stumped, I watched it again. An utter waste of time. It has no secrets to yield, no mysteries to clear up -- except maybe the meaning of its title...I have to admit it's flawlessly executed -- in the same way that a Fig Newton can be flawless...but as art, aside from some first-rate acting and swell casting, it's almost completely without interest...Director and cowriter Alexander Payne has nothing to say about over-the-hill males that we don't already know or couldn't find in a sitcom. Overall the film is unoriginal and unchallenging -- unless one considers an obsession with wine a daring subject." He concludes by pointing out that while critics may like the movie so much because they identify with the "infantile" "loser" wine devotee Giamatti plays, since a connoisseur is a kind of critic (as A.O. Scott proposed, reacting to the exaggerated praise), the public has voted differently -- Sideways is down at 115th on the Variety box office chart. Still, Sideways is tops with a certain kind of "thoughtful" viewer, especially around here in California.

My reaction differs from both Rosenbaum's and the "thoughtful" viewers'. I was simply glad to find anything at all to like in the movie; in fact I found quite a lot to like in it. Likewise with Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou -- which, however, I liked even better. Anderson and Payne are viewed by many as America's bright young auteurs, so one wanted to like them. But The Royal Tenenbaums seemed nauseatingly precious, and About Schmidt was self-satisfied and mean-spirited. Anderson's new movie, The Life Aquatic, was something of a revelation, mainly through Bill Murray's genial portrait of another American loser -- arguably a much more accomplished one -- who finds a kind of redemption. This time Anderson's quirkiness made sense.

Sideways makes sense too, but it's far less winning. Its success is in its precision, its social and psychological specificity. Alas, Rosenbaum is right: there's nothing especially profound about the observations. But the details of Payne's new West Coast mileu (he's happily left Nebraska, which had obviously lost its charm for him), while not original, are spot-on, and the acting, as Rosenbaum admits, is very fine. Like Rosenbaum, I watched Sideways a second time, and that acting was what I saw. It's a special pleasure to watch Paul Giammati. He always hits his mark. He's a splendid movie actor. In every scene, he gets the precise effect. But why do we want to watch these two men? That isn't clear to me. Giamatti's character, as Rosenbaum notes, is given a ray of hope (the other, Church's, merely appears to have gotten away with his gross pre-nuptial misbehavior). It's only a ray. It serves to soften the portrait. If Virginia Madsen's warm, beautiful character can see something to like in him, so can we. But so what?

By zeroing in on a couple of middle-class white male mid-life losers spending a self-indulgent week in the wine country, Payne has gotten specific about California without totally trashing it, and softened his clear-eyed portrait of his flawed characters enough to leave at least one of them with a mildly hopeful future. There is, arguably, more keen specificity -- but only a little -- in Payne's social portraiture than you'd get in a good sitcom. That's enough to make you watch, and the acting doesn't pall. But like Rosenbaum, I can't see going back to watch again. Note that Brody found "the same sense of pleasure and delight" on re-watching Sideways. That's not how it works with great art. With The Life Aquatic -- not that it's great art, but it's a better movie -- there's such a rich panoply of detail that it all looks different on re-viewing. Not so with Sideways. It's finely observed, but it's no masterpiece. 2004 was a good year for movies. There's a lot of equally watchable stuff out there. Unlike Rosenbaum, I'd put it in the top ten U.S. (not worldwide) movies of the year. But it's not the best by any means.

©2005 Chris Knipp
CineScene