Director Presents ‘Sideways’ View of Life

Punning on the name of an interview subject is one of the lowest tools available to the lazy critic, the sort of device that substitutes a feeble smile for real engagement with the work, in order to get it finished. And so it’s with a wince that any self-respecting writer can comment on the, well, pain running through the work of independent director Alexander Payne.

But it’s there all the same. Take his latest offbeat dramedy, Sideways—a perverse buddy movie in which two aging male friends (Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church) while away an hour or two competing for the title of most pathetically humiliated. By the film’s end, there is something of redemption for the pair, but there have been ample injuries along the way—and Church’s broken nose pales in comparison to the psychic wounds both suffer. Or consider Election, Payne’s 1999 film, the last third of which Matthew Broderick spends with an enormously, excruciatingly swollen bee sting on his face and spiraling shame in his soul. Payne’s films are funny, and they often dance with profundity, but they can also be very painful to watch—and, one imagines, even more painful to live through for his characters.

So what gives? Why does Payne torture his creations this way?

Asked a question along these lines at a post-screening Q-and-A on last month’s Sideways promotional tour, Payne looks a bit uncomfortable himself. His first response to the member of the audience—who has suggested the word “masochistic” to describe Payne’s style—is to supply the word he believes the speaker intended: “sadistic.”

And that, more or less, is it. Payne follows this bit of cool condescension with a smooth line.

“It’s good to beat up your characters a little bit,” he says. “It’s funny.”

But Payne, who beats up his characters more than a little bit, is dodging the question of whether he’s gone beyond comedy to sadism. The next day, meeting with three writers from college newspapers, Payne is affable and, eventually, more responsive.

“They deserve it,” Payne says wryly of his characters’ abuse. “They’re asking for it.”

In a moment, at last, he clearly pitches a slapstick theory of cinema.

“How do you expect drama if you don’t test your characters?” Payne asks. “Comedy is pain…it’s pratfalls, it’s slipping on bananas.”

Still, Payne jumps to distinguish his work from that of Todd Solondz, whom he calls out by name as a “cruel” artist. “If there’s contempt,” he says of his own work, “not always but often it’s ameliorated by understanding.”

For he does harbor affection for his tortured creations—“Sure,” Payne offers with a wide nod and no hesitation when asked if he loves his characters. And then, grasping the contradiction inherent in his work: “I love myself and hate myself.”

Maybe “masochistic” wasn’t so far off after all. And this is the point: the things that make films like Sideways and Election so painful apply mostly to a very specific subset of viewers. Their nightmares are drawn directly from the mind of the neurotic, ham-handed male, and probably don’t seem nearly as nightmarish to others in the audience. (Indeed, Payne’s female characters in Sideways, at least, are little more than unmotivated archetypes, advancing the story of the male leads’ mortification.) Payne has a penchant for hanging his basket-case men upside down by their toenails, but it seems he knows what they’re feeling.

THE REAL WORLD

Payne, though, insists that his films are about more than just uptight men and their various hurts. They’re characterized by one thing above all: humanity.

This is the message that he stays on, the mission statement he pounds at like Jerry Maguire with films instead of football players. Ask Payne about pain and he ambles (“I sound like some ridiculous Woody Allen character,” he muses at one point). When it comes to humanity in film, he can’t stop answering the question.

American movies, Payne says, have become too perfect, too artificial. And he thinks that has a lot to do with what’s wrong with the world at large today.

“Things are really dire,” he says. “The fraudulence in movies is…one of the reasons we find ourselves now as a society lost.”

Painted and tailored props, actors with unrelenting good looks—the things some directors spend their days striving for are anathema to Payne. His films, he says, aim to fulfill the fundamental job of movie-making: to mirror the real world as closely as possible.

“If it’s a fake mirror, then what are you doing?” he asks. “What’s wrong with reality?”

If Payne’s easy enthusiasm, his preaching of what he practices, is an oddity in a scene populated by dorky eccentrics who snicker at their own work even as they labor over it, Payne has at least one thing solidly in common with other indie auteurs: he loves the 70s.

“Movies were better when they were more human,” he says of that decade. “You could finally show tits and say ‘fuck’ and show anything that happens in real life.”

Now, Payne fears that those breakthroughs have been “co-opted by these capitalist forces.” Still, when it comes to the future of American cinema, a surprising optimistic streak comes out.

Payne brims with heartening examples: low-budget successes like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Lost in Translation, less conventional studio fare like Spiderman 2 (“just a great film”)—even the fact that he was able to make Sideways “with no movie stars” gives him hope.

The way Payne sees it, the times might finally be on his side. He thinks humanism is “by now an idea so old it can be new again.”

“It can be a new fashion, so why the hell not?” he asks.

Even at his sunniest peak, this dark satirist can’t resist undermining his own predictions. He may embrace the twists and turns of fashion, but at heart he thinks they’re meaningless.

“Who gives a fuck about a lapel?” Payne bursts out at one point.

For now, when it comes to the ever-thinning and widening lapel of realism in film, the answer is Payne.

—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.