Sideways

(Herald rating: * * * *)

Named the best film of last year by the four big American critics' circles, the new picture by the writer-director team behind About Schmidt was also described in an excellent piece by A. O. Scott in the New York Times as the year's most overrated release.

He didn't dislike it; indeed his affection for it is evident in the piece. But he attributes its generous critical reception to the fact that its main character is "by temperament if not by profession, a critic".

More than that, he suggests the doleful, self-doubting, slightly obsessive main character Miles (Giamatti) - white, middle-aged, overweight and fond of a glass of wine - may be the embodiment of the archetypal critic.

Far be it from me to offer a view on that. But despite director Payne's view that the public hungers for "human films" - by which he presumably means not the high-tech, effects-driven blockbusters - Sideways has been welcomed far less warmly at the American box-office than by that nation's critics.

All that said, and at the risk of inviting inferences, I must say I enjoyed it hugely.

A film of modest ambitions triumphantly achieved, it's a blend of two cinematic staples - an odd-couple, road movie. The odd couple is Miles, who is part oenophile, part lush and all mid-life crisis; and Jack (Church), a genial, blond-maned hedonist who's on the verge of marriage. The road is through the Californian wine country and the going is almost immediately as rough as the genre demands.

Much of the spark derives from the odd couple's oddness. Jack and Miles were college mates but they have almost nothing in common now. Their physical dissimilarity underlines this and one of this precisely constructed film's few omissions is that it fails to explain why they would still be friends, much less go off on a week-long, two-man, golf and wine-drinking stag party.

In any case, they are on two very different trips. Miles swills the wine in his glass and pronounces it "quaffable but not transcendent" (the language of tasting is both a motif and a running gag) while Jack says "it tastes pretty damn good to me".

As the journey progresses, the differences mount. Randy Jack wants to cram as much sex as he can into his last week of bachelorhood; mournful Miles wants to visit vineyards, play golf and fret about the fortunes of his unpublished 700-page novel which, he tells anyone who asks, "devolves into Robbe-Grillet".

The pair hook up with Maya (Madsen), a heartsore horticulture graduate moonlighting as a waitress and Stephanie (Oh), a "pour girl" in one of the vineyards.

As Jack spends unconscionable amounts of time naked with Stephanie, Maya and Miles move more tentatively. The centre of their relationship is a perfectly judged scene in which Miles discusses the pinot noir grape (thin-skinned, vulnerable, temperamental but, when cared for, sublime) and we and Maya realise around the same time that he's talking about himself.

It sounds hokey and forced, but it works because of the quiet and self-effacing charm of Giamatti and Madsen. This is as poignant and perfectly authentic a relationship as the screen has given us.

At more than two hours, the film is maybe 20 minutes too long for a four-hander and the ending, which seemed neat to me when it happened, looked the next day more like a failure of nerve.

But Sideways delivers pleasure on many levels - Church is a finely judged buffoon and a comic sequence involving the retrieval of a lost wallet is a cracker - and touched me in a way few films do.

CAST: Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Sandra Oh Virginia Madsen
DIRECTOR: ALEXANDER PAYNE
RUNNING TIME: 129 minutes.
RATING: M, SEX SCENES AND OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE
SCREENING: Rialto