“Sideways”: Grapes, Nuts, and Flakes

Quaffed any good pinot noir lately? The grape got new respect in 2004 via Alexander Payne’s Sideways, a box office hit that was also a critical darling. (It was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, and won for the adaptation of Rex Pickett’s comic novel by Payne and co-author Jim Taylor.) I’ve long used it in my UCLA Extension advanced screenwriting courses as one way to approach various aspects of the screenwriter’s craft. Sideways provided a major boost to the acting careers of Paul Giamatti and his castmates, as well as a shot in the arm to tourism in California’s Santa Ynez Valley. It also upended the wine industry: after the advent of Sideways, merlot was considered by many to be a wine grape non grata.

 In 2024, Applause Books released Sideways Uncorked, described on its cover as “the perfect pairing of film and wine.” There’s no question that the authors know whereof they speak. Kirk Honeycutt was for twenty years a writer and then the chief film critic of The Hollywood Reporter. So he knows the film world inside and out. His in-depth understanding of independent films like Sideways was enhanced by his experience with low-budget maven Roger Corman on Final Judgement, a 1992 priest-and-stripper quickie for which Kirk wrote the original screenplay. (As Roger’s story editor I worked with Kirk on the project. I best recall a little moment in which the accused killer tries to get away from potential danger by climbing aboard a city bus. Roger refused to accept this quirky choice, reasoning that a badass required a motorcycle or something cooler than public transit. Thus my boss firmly rejected what I had found original and characteristic.) 

 In this book, it’s Kirk’s job to explain how Sideways came to be, how it was written, financed, cast, shot, and distributed.  Part of his focus is on the implications of Sideways being an indie film: by not allowing a studio with deep pockets to dictate key artistic choices (like the dream casting of George Clooney and Brad Pitt in the leading roles instead of the less glamorous Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church), Payne preserved his vision of this film as featuring two ordinary down-on-their-luck guys.

 Kirk’s insider stories about the making of Sideways, corroborated by the film’s cast and crew, are augmented by the contributions of his wife, Mira Advani Honeycutt. A longtime wine journalist, she puts her expertise to work in explaining the realities of the wine industry, especially as this applies to the Santa Ynez Valley. She begins by focusing in on the all-important physical properties of the area, what the French call “terroir.”  These are the environmental factors—relating to weather, soil quality, and the like—that determine which grapes can be most successfully planted in a given plot of land. Santa Barbara County’s Santa Ynez Valley offers vastly different climate conditions from Northern California’s famous grape-growing counties, and she traces the history of pinot noir cultivation in the region, showing in detail how this notoriously finicky grape (see Giamatti’s now-famous speech about the special needs of pinot) thrives in its soil. For wine lovers, she also advises on the best wineries for pinot noir in California, Oregon, and elsewhere. Nor does she neglect merlot, which is scorned by Giamatti’s character in the film, but certainly is worthy of having its own enthusiasts. It’s amusing to note that the book is dedicated “to Cinephiles, Pinotphiles, and Merlot Mavericks.”

 Want to know how the real-life owner of a Solvang restaurant made a fortune off the success of Sideways? This book’s for you. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tallying the Votes: “Conclave”

You’d think that, after November 5, I would have had enough of elections. But there I was, two days later, checking out a film that is all about what it takes to get elected. No, I wasn’t watching  Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick doing everything in her power to be chosen student body president in Election. (That 1999 flick—both delightful and disturbing—turned Matthew Broderick of Ferris Bueller fame into a much-beleaguered grown-up, and established writer/director Alexander Payne as someone to watch. But I digress.)

 What I saw last Thursday night was not about high school girls in very short skirts, but rather about Roman Catholic cardinals in long ones. The brand-new Conclave, based on a popular novel, takes us behind the scenes of the election of a new pope , after his predecessor is found dead in his Vatican apartment. There’s been no murder most foul: it’s clear the old man died of natural causes. Both the public and the princes of the church are in deep mourning . But life goes on, and a new man must quickly be chosen to wear the so-called Ring of the Fisherman, like the one that has just been wrested off of the dead pope’s finger.

 That’s why Roman Catholic cardinals from around the globe are locked in the Sistine Chapel, directly beneath Michelangelo’s famous frescos, to choose one of their number as the Supreme Pontiff. Each will write a name on a small slip of paper, which  will ritualistically be slipped into a chalice. An appointed cardinal reads each ballot. Because it takes a two-thirds majority to win, multiple rounds of balloting are generally required. Then, at last, the burned ballots will emit white rather than black smoke, indicating to those waiting breathlessly outside that a new pope has been chosen.

 The film Conclave makes clear that, amid all the ritual formality of the Latin rite voting process, there’s often a real power struggle going on. The papal candidates make no speeches and issue no campaign promises, but their views are well known to their fellow cardinals, and factions naturally arise in support of various approaches to the ancient institution they all hold dear. Some skullduggery is also to be expected: the always memorable John Lithgow plays a cardinal who trips up a rival by dramatically exposing a long-ago transgression. We meet also a deeply conservative cardinal who seeks to undo many of the church’s recent reforms, a mysterious Mexican cardinal who was elevated in secrecy by the late pope, and Stanley Tucci as an American cardinal who’s probably too liberal-minded to be chosen pope. At the very center of the film is Ralph Fiennes as a deeply scrupulous cardinal faced with the unenviable task of managing the ins and outs of the Holy See. I should not overlook the film’s one important female character, Isabella Rossellini as Sister Agnes, who sees bad behavior that the cardinals will not admit to. There’s one point the film makes crystal-clear: every cardinal, no matter how modest his manner, secretly dreams of being elevated  to the papacy, and has long since picked out his papal name.

  Conclave is directed by Edward Berger who won acclaim for last year’s All Quiet on the Western Front. He beautifully manages the film’s huge canvas: Conclave is gorgeous to look at, and is well served by a fascinating score. The acting ensemble proves impressive, and Fiennes is deservedly getting raves for his complex role. Yes, toward the end the plot twists become increasingly unconvincing, but Conclave remains a satisfying behind-the-scenes look at a world we’ll never fully know.

 

Facts About American Fiction

American Fiction nabbed the People’s Choice Award at the 2023 Toronto Film Festival. I wasn’t there, but I would probably have voted for it too. After all, the film—by writer-director Cord Jefferson in an assured cinematic debut—touches with sardonic glee on several subjects all too familiar to me, including academia and the wonderful world of book publishing. But American Fiction is also much concerned with racial matters, and with the delicate question of who is entitled to tell whose stories. I can’t pretend to appreciate, as an outsider, what it’s like to be a Black intellectual in today’s America. But for me American Fiction is a prime example of how to make a funny but pithy small movie (the kind Alexander Payne does so well), while also weighing in on important matters of today. Timely? You bet.

 Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, PhD (an unforgettable Jeffrey Wright) isn’t doing so hot. At the California university where he teaches English and creative writing, a white student berates him for assigning a Flannery O’Connor short story with the n-word in its title. The self-righteousness of this generation of students, it seems, is wearing him down. His fellow faculty members don’t show much sympathy for his unwanted position as the campus point-person for all things Black, but do remind him that he hasn’t published a new novel in years. (A scholarly and self-contained man, he tends to write lyrical books with allusions to the mythology of the ancient Greeks. Being cutting-edge hardly interests him.) Because he has an upcoming trip to the east coast to help judge a literary competition, he reluctantly accepts his colleagues’ strong suggestion that he take a leave and spend time with family.

 Ellison’s family members are not his favorite family. I won’t go into detail and spoil plot surprises, but they’re a fractured bunch, full of grudges and resentments. They are, though, impressively well educated. His late father was a medical doctor, as are his two (very complicated) siblings. They live well, spending time at a wonderful old summer place at the New England shore. Their Black heritage is important to them, philosophically speaking, but there’s no way they feel much personal connection to the whole ghetto experience. In the course of his stay, Monk visits his literary agent, only to discover that no one wants to publish his latest manuscript. He is, he discovers, just not “Black” enough to satisfy editors looking for the next best-seller. That’s when an evil impulse strikes him, and he begins to write—at white heat, one might say—a raw, raging narrative full of every cliché (guns! drugs! bad grammar!) of inner-city African-American life. Pretty soon he’s facing an unexpected dilemma: how does he turn down a small fortune in advances and the sale of movie rights for a novel he doesn’t want to claim as his? (His literary agent certainly has something to say about the choice he ends up making.)

  The  plot thickens as Monk takes on family responsibilities, finds (maybe!) love, and—as part of his work on the committee judging contemporary literary excellence—runs into opposing views that get him (and us) thinking. (I’m still chewing on the position taken by the one other person of color in the group.) If all of this seems solemn, fear not. Hollywood (in all senses) basically saves the day. American Fiction builds to a truly hilarious conclusion, a moment that in one fell swoop lampoons all of the film’s satirical targets. And then sends us to the exits in a marvelous mood.  

 

School Daze with The Holdovers

 I’m someone who has only a small degree of tolerance for Christmas music.  Two weeks before Thanksgiving, I used up my entire 2023 quota (“The Little Drummer Boy”! Baby Jesus songs!) watching The Holdovers. Not that this newest Alexander Payne film is all sweetness and light; Payne’s cynicism about the way folks cope with the human condition undercuts the saccharine nature of his score. But I’m still trying to decide how I feel about this latest entry in the boys-at-a-boarding-school genre. (Think Rushmore, The Dead Poet’s Society, A Separate Peace . . .) The reviewer at the New York Times adored The Holdovers, using it as a jumping off point for his own very mixed personal memories. The reviewer at the Los Angeles Times hated it, accusing Payne of insincerity, and worse. Me? I found it appealing in its best moments and over-calculated in its worst. I liked these characters, but couldn’t bring myself to accept their reality.

 Paul Giamatti, who shone in Payne’s 2004 Sideways, is something of a specialist in playing morose men who can’t quite accommodate to their own time and place. Somewhat like the late Wilford Brimley, he seems never to have been young. As a hapless wine connoisseur in Sideways, he came off as emphatically middle-aged when he was still in his thirties. Now he’s aged into the role of a longtime teacher of ancient history at a tony New England prep school where most of the boys (in their jackets and ties and floppy 1970s hair) have grown up expecting winter-break Caribbean vacations and easy coasting into Ivy League colleges. (Giamatti, the son of a former president of Yale who later became the Commissioner of Major League Baseball, has had his own prep school experience, so he knows the drill.) In The Holdovers he’s fitted out with a cutting wit, a secret sorrow, and a series of small physical afflictions that make him unpleasant company to just about everyone. There is about him from the start, though, a quiet sweetness that I wasn’t expecting, especially in his treatment of the campus’s few women.

 One of them, Mary Lamb, is the head of the school’s  cooking staff.  Like Giamatti’s Paul Hunham, she’s stuck on campus during winter break. And she too has a sorrow, though it’s hardly a secret: her only child, a highly promising graduate of the school, has just been killed in Vietnam. As movingly played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Mary is both sweet and sour: happily, the script doesn’t allow her to be merely a sad-faced bereaved mom. The Vietnam angle does take us by surprise, because there’s little sense that this story is set back in time. But perhaps that’s accurate: on this campus, among these well-parented young men, an overseas war is hardly top of mind. Hell, no—they have no intention of going . . . and their parents will see that their draft boards stay far, far away.

The third member of the trio left behind at Christmas is a first-time movie actor who makes an impressive debut here. Dominic Sessa, an actual prep school grad (class of ’22) plays the classic smart but angry kid with no friends and no family to rely on. Naturally, he and Mr. Hunham develop a prickly but unmistakable bond, one that will take an unexpected turn late in the film. I’m a bit Scrooge-ish about the outcome, but Payne’s sympathy for the walking wounded remains very much intact. (There’s one more such character in the film that I deliberately haven’t mentioned, but suffice it to say that Payne is very well-named.)