Buddies on the bottle

"Formally, the American film has been dead for a while," says director Alexander Payne. "The corporations have needed their movies to be consumed as readily as McDonald's, so they have to look like each other, but that's not working any more - or maybe it is, but working less. So when the beast is dying it needs new blood, it opens its legs to new talent to come in. And since, politically, we're in a bad way right now - a very confusing way - the arts in general, and certainly cinema, has to respond to that, because there's going to be a demand for it."

His response is Sideways, which won the Golden Globes for Best Film ( Comedy or Musical) and Best Screenplay on Sunday and, although overlooked by Bafta voters (just one nomination for adapted screenplay), remains a favourite for next month's Oscars.

It's the relationship film of the year, due for release next week. The director's fourth film, it may sound like a tried-and-tested road movie - two middle-aged buddies heading out on a wine jaunt to California - but there is rich humour and an honest portrayal of male friendship that sets it apart from the darkly satirical tone of his earlier Election and About Schmidt. "It's just more fun," says Payne, 43. "I wanted to make a film that very clearly defaults to comedy."

Based on Rex Pickett's novel, Sideways revolves around Miles (Paul Giamatti), an emotionally frigid high-school English teacher and failed novelist waiting to hear if his 700-page semi-autobiographical tome, The Day After Yesterday, will ever be published, and Jack (Thomas Haden Church), a washed-up soap actor with a rampant libido who is getting married the following weekend.

Once the pair get on the road, Jack is interested in getting laid as often as possible and he wants Miles to score too, that being his present to his depressed best man who, two years after divorce, still pines for his ex-wife. Miles hooks up with a divorced waitress (Virginia Madsen), who knows as much about wine as he does; Jack meets single mom Steph (Payne's wife, Sandra Oh), who thinks she has found true love in a man who, unknown to her, is a week off getting wed. Gender, friendship and emotion are intimately explored.

These aren't movie characters; they have believable flaws, foibles, failings, and real, unfulfilled desires.

On the surface, Miles and Jack couldn't be an odder couple, almost a reprise of Lemmon and Matthau. Former college friends, Miles is the perpetual worrier, Jack the lad now trading on fading good looks. Miles is an oenophile, Jack tastes wine while chewing gum. Friendship, says Payne, is an abiding mystery. "Often we're friends with people because of momentum or inertia. I certainly had this experience with my college roommate. We were very different. There were a few years where it lingered, then we dropped it."

Miles is another of Payne's pathetic leading characters, in the mould of Matthew Broderick in Election and Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt. "They're very, very lost, with an internal crisis that makes them feel very uneasy with the world," he says.

Superbly played by American Splendor star Giamatti, Miles is petulant, peevish, ill-tempered, quick to blame anyone but himself for his failings, but Payne never allows the audience to feel judgmental - even when he steals money from his aging mother or calls his ex-wife while drunk. So, what attracts Payne to these losers? "It's the story. We're interested in human beings and movies that are about people. I guess everyone's in some kind of crisis of some type or another, all the time."

Sideways is far funnier and bawdier than About Schmidt, which broke with helter-skelter comedy traditions by daring to be humdrum. "Many people found it quite dreary," Payne admits. Sideways, he insists, has "the feeling of an Italian comedy from the late Fifties, early Sixties, a certain devil-may-care lightness".