Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Sideways
2004 · Alexander Payne · Sideways on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Miles's hands at every tasting: swirl, sniff, sip, spit. (performance)
Giamatti runs the same drill each time. Lift, swirl, smell, hold it in the mouth, assess, spit. He has built a whole self on a ritual whose entire point is not to swallow.
Payoff: A man with an exquisite palate and no follow-through. The procedure tells you what kind of trouble he is in. In the reading: the gest. The reading calls this a gest: a posture that suddenly exposes the whole social relation it sits inside.
Watch how small the two men look against the vine rows. (camera)
Phedon Papamichael keeps a sober, observational distance, setting Miles and Jack against wide valley landscapes and two-lane roads. The camera closes in only for the quiet two-shots that carry the feeling.
Payoff: The landscape dwarfs their small crises and asks nothing of them, so the scale reads as indifference rather than destiny.
Notice the motel rooms, chain counters, and tasting-room formica. (setting)
Payne sets the week in interchangeable American nowheres: motels, a fast-food joint, a cluttered mother's house, a pouring counter. The wine-country postcard stays at the edge of the frame.
Payoff: These places refuse to work as a stage for anything, which keeps the trip from becoming an adventure. In the reading: any-space-whatever. The reading calls these any-spaces-whatever: interchangeable places that no longer function as a setting for action.
Listen for the bossa nova playing under Miles's worst moments. (sound)
Rolfe Kent scores the film with light, jazz-inflected cocktail-lounge ease. The breeziness holds while Giamatti lies, drinks alone, or humiliates himself, and the music never swells to tell you how to feel.
Payoff: The score refuses to underline the misery, which keeps the sadness from tipping over into self-pity.
Count how long a conversation runs before Tent cuts away. (cutting)
Kevin Tent stays patient in the talk scenes and lets the awkward pauses sit. His timing turns sharp for the set pieces. A single scene can move from farce to flatness without a jolt.
Payoff: Behavior gets more room than plot, so you end up watching people instead of waiting for events.
Once you have seen it
Watch the Styrofoam cup at the fast-food counter. (setting)
Miles has been saving the 1961 Cheval Blanc for an occasion. He drinks it fast, under bad light, with nobody to tell. The bottle gets opened and the occasion never arrives.
Payoff: The film does not grant him the occasion. It cancels the idea of one, which is the device he used to defer his life. In the reading: demark. The reading calls that cup a demark: an object that snaps the chain of expectations it normally belongs to.
Track what has actually changed by the last scene. (structure)
The novel does not sell. Jack marries anyway. Miles does not visibly reform. Every promise a road movie makes about transformation goes quietly unkept while every promise about the trip itself is delivered.
Payoff: The journey transforms nothing, and the final beat is a knock on a door rather than an outcome.
Watch Madsen's face during her porch speech about wine. (performance)
Maya talks about a bottle changing, peaking, and then declining. Madsen plays it as a description of a wine and nothing more. Nobody in the scene names what else is being described.
Payoff: Two people talk about wine and about themselves in the same breath, which is the film's whole method compressed into one scene.
Carry this in: Watch the hands. Swirl, sniff, spit. Miles has built an identity on a ritual whose entire point is never to swallow.