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Why take such a dim view of the demon drink?

Paul Giamatti as Miles Raymond in Sideways
  • Posted at 1:02pm
  • 12 December 2008
  • by AndrewCollins-RT
  • 1 comment

I'm too old and sensible for drinking games, but I am always impressed by anyone who's tried to match Richard E Grant, tipple for tipple, while viewing the boozy Withnail & I – leaving out, one hopes, the glug of lighter fuel. A far more sophisticated experience can be gained from quaffing along to Sideways (Saturday 13 December Channel 4).

The Oscar-winning comedy, which sees two buddies bonding on a crawl round California's vineyards, is the cinematic equivalent of a wine lake: the connoisseur of the pair, Miles (Paul Giamatti), swills each sample for "colour and clarity", while Jack (Thomas Haden Church) waits impatiently to knock it back, more in the style of Withnail.

Although played for gentle laughs, one can't help salivating impatiently as a hint of strawberry, passion fruit, asparagus and the "flutter of a nutty Edam cheese" is detected, or the pinot grape is eulogised on a romantic date: "thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early . . . its flavours are just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and ancient on the planet."

They say wine sales shot up after the film's release in 2004 – I don't know about you, but I was gasping for a glass of vino by the end of it. This, of course, makes it an ideal film to see at home on the small screen, with a bottle chilling to perfection nearby.

It's not a new observation that cinema is capable of evoking taste and smell. I always fancy a leg of chicken after The Private Life of Henry VIII.

But booze is not often given the kind of rhapsodic, sensory, descriptive treatment afforded it by Sideways. Strong drink is more commonly used as a device to precipitate sexual indiscretion, loss of control, a huge row or, in the most extreme cases, mental, social and physical breakdown. Cheers!

Back in the 1940s, The Lost Weekend painted a gruesome picture of alcoholism, showing Ray Milland's character as desperate, tragic and self-deluding. (Director Billy Wilder claimed the studio was offered money by the liquor industry not to release it.)

In the 1960s, Blake Edwards's Days of Wine and Roses added to cinema's unofficial temperance movement with a look at the dangers of "social drinking". Nic Cage took it one step further in Leaving Las Vegas, aiming to drink himself to death.

In the movies, a bottle of wine or whisky is a prop, at best, and a lethal weapon, at worst. Whereas, in Sideways, Miles's beloved bottle of 1961 Cheval Blanc, which he keeps for a special occasion, is symbolic only of hope.

It does for wine what Ice Cold in Alex did for a nice cool lager. Although with only one glass at the very end, that film makes for a much duller drinking game.

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  • Posted on 16 January 2009
  • at 9:40pm
  • by joost

can i just point out (if its not too clumsy of me) that the whole connoisseur thing in the film is a sham. He is hiding from himself that he is an alcoholic! Hence the mirror of jack. Remember that miles steals from his mother and regularly drinks himself to oblivion (among other "textbook" symptoms. The film's message was more of a warning to us middle-class aloholics (yes I am one too).

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