Earlier this week, Variety released their inevitably controversial list “The 100 Best Comedy Movies of All Time,” causing fans of John Candy and Chris Farley to erupt in outrage over the glaring omission of the two legends – all while middle-aged would-be novelists pop some bottles.
Look, it is virtually impossible for anyone to ever craft a definitive top comedy film list that would please every single person who reads it. Like art itself, humor is subjective, and there’s always going to be one a-hole on the internet crying about how Norbit, Disaster Movie or some other F-grade flick should have been on the list. Hell, even the definition of the term “comedy movie” is up for debate – pitting Fargo against Farley was certainly a bold choice.
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But one entry on the list that has gone on the radar in the general uproar, yet which deserves serious scrutiny, is Alexander Payne’s 2004 dramedy Sideways, starring Paul Giamatti as the divorced, drunk stand-in for the very film critics who deemed it a masterpiece.
Sideways told the story of Miles (Giamatti), a wine snob, struggling novelist and recent divorcee, who goes on a bachelor trip to wine country in Santa Barbara with his best friend Jack, played by Thomas Hayden Church. There, they meet free-spirits Stephanie and Maya (Sandra Oh and Virginia Madsen respectively), beginning torrid romances based on some serious mistruths amidst the swirling of pinot noir.
Now, I’m not ashamed to admit that, despite being neither a member of the generation that worships their own upper-middle-class ennui nor much of a drinker myself, I’m actually a big fan of Sideways. It’s a charming, comfortable and occasionally poignant travel flick with spectacular performances from its star-studded cast. However, if you look at the critical response to Sideways, you’d think that the film was the Gen-X yuppies’ spiritual successor to Citizen Kane.
On top of winning Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards along with nominations in four other categories, Sideways absolutely swept every awards ceremony hosted by every critics’ association, society and circle. According to film critic A.O. Scott in his ruthless essay “The Most Overrated Film of the Year,” it’s no coincidence that his colleagues all fawned over a film about a slightly pretentious writer drinking his way through a divorce.
“The reaction to Sideways is worth noting, less because it isn’t quite as good as everyone seems to be saying it is than because the near-unanimous praise of it reveals something about the psychology of critics, as distinct from our taste,” Scott wrote, “Miles, the movie’s hero, has been variously described as a drunk, a wine snob, a sad sack and a loser, but it has seldom been mentioned that he is also, by temperament if not by profession, a critic.”
Scott goes on to describe how Miles’ enjoyment of wine is based in his ability to discern the finer details of each bottle, ones which his less-cultured buddy Jack misses. Sideways is, as Scott points out, pro-sophistication, and its best scene is born from Miles’ ability to reveal himself through his analysis of the pinot varietal. Wrote Scott, “In Sideways, a good many critics see themselves, and it is only natural that we should love what we see.”
Now, as many of Scott’s long-time colleagues heap superlative praise upon Sideways while ignoring classic comedy films that are far more, well, comedic, it’s worth revisiting Scott’s argument while broadening it out with the benefit of two decades’ worth of hindsight.
Beyond featuring one of the most film-critic-like protagonists in cinema history, Sideways is also a love letter to a certain kind of yearning Gen-X male, coddled by decades of economic prosperity and relative political stability, whose entire character arc revolves around his desire to get more out of his comfortable life than just the financial freedom to take so many vacations to wine country that he’s on a first-name basis with all the vintners.
Since Sideways first dazzled the critical community, the woe-is-me reflections of men like Miles have fallen far out of fashion in film (and, let’s face it, in real life), but the listless, Gen-X, white-collar white guys who made Sideways such a smash-hit critical sensation are still trying to define the tastes of the modern age, so Sideways gets to pretend that it’s the 14th best comedy movie of all time while Blazing Saddles rots at #77.
Then again, Blazing Saddles never got an absolutely insane Japanese-language remake.