Two for the road

It's difficult to describe how good Alexander Payne's Sideways is because, on the face of it, the story looks thin and a trifle unappetising. It's the tale of two middle-aged failures who go on a trip to Californian wine country a week before one of them gets married.

They make a complete mess of meeting women on the way and, though their tale ends hopefully, we have no assurance whatever that their lives won't continue in the same hapless vein.

Yet this is an astonishingly surefooted road movie from Payne, who has displayed his talent in Election and About Schmidt, without such triumphant, if never obvious, flair.

Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor have adapted Rex Pickett's novel with great shrewdness. With good actors, the film couldn't really have failed. And the cast is brilliant, with a performance from Paul Giamatti that is almost beyond praise.

He plays Miles, a teacher, failed novelist and unrecovered divorcé, whose temperament leads him into the depths of despair at one moment and elation the next.

He loves his wine and is capable of going on about Pinot, Cabernet and why Merlot is undrinkable until the cows come home. But when the publishers reject his novel and his ex-wife gets remarried, even the grape is not enough.

He has to deal with Jack (Thomas Haden Church) who will drink anything and has come along for a final fling before marriage. Jack is a hopeless womaniser, an actor who knows he'll never make it and the sort of man who would find love with a tent pole if it smiled nicely at him and proved to be female.

Jack makes it in a big way with Sandra Oh's wine pourer, until she finds out that he is about to get married and breaks his nose. Miles, ever the pessimist, takes an age to make a move on Virginia Madsen's waitress and then almost loses her out of sheer funk.

The two men clearly need each other to get through life at all, and Payne's best trick is to make us like them, copious warts and all. They seem totally human and believable, like a latterday Laurel and Hardy, but rooted in present day neuroses.

Giamatti is perfect and Church not far behind, while the women give us the same sense that they are not acting at all. These four inhabit their parts so comfortably that there's no sense of predictability. We're eavesdropping on lives that are as messy and as unsatisfactory as most of our own, and we're rooting for them all the way.