Sideways
-for girls.
New York Times reviewer AO Scott, in describing the Oscar buzz and general critical hoopla surrounding
Sideways
, delicately suggests that maybe, just maybe, critics loved the film not due to any great achievement on its part but because they so identified with its main character, the middle-aged alcoholic and failed novelist Miles. Perhaps by the
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same token, if you happen to be a heterosexual female critic in, say, your late 30s with, oh, an unwilling penchant for addicted men…then you might declare
p.s.
the best film of 2004. But it's such an accomplished and engrossing film that even viewers outside that narrow demographic will find themselves drawn in and well-rewarded.
Louise Harrington (Laura Linney, virtually reprising her role as the brittle overfunctioning sister in You Can Count on Me) has her life neatly arranged; at 39, she's a successful admissions officer for Columbia's School for the Arts and has a snug platonic relationship with her ex-husband Peter (rugged-featured warhorse Gabriel Byrne). But there's something stapled together about her persona; as she applies foundation and rouge in the first scene, we realize it's meant to conceal her desperate fear of aging, of losing control. And her control starts to unravel when Peter reveals he's a sex addict whose partners have numbered in the hundreds, and when her in-recovery brother Sammy (Paul Rudd) reenters the family, to the delight of their doting mother (Lois Smith) and Louise's disapproval. When she receives an application from 24-year-old painter F Scott Feinstadt, who has the same name as her tragically killed high school boyfriend, almost in a trance Louise finds herself calling to arrange an "interview." And when F Scott (Topher Grace) turns up in her office and is the spitting image of her dead love, she becomes the admissions officer of every young man's dreams-seducing him, with the obvious ensuing complications.
Linney, the poor man's Julianne Moore, should take out a patent on her Brave Smile, seen to good effect here as in
The Truman Show
and
Kinsey
. But
p.s.
gives her additional range, as Louise's anger erupts along with her sexuality. In one particularly unsettling scene, she forces F Scott to imagine what he'll look like as a 40-something used-car salesman, a failure as a painter. Her voice and face become his
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mirror: vicious, relentless, chilling. When she concludes, "It's that humiliation that will connect you to the rest of us, that will give your work meaning," it's clear she's speaking about herself, her terror, her hope for redemption.
The rest of the cast are quietly outstanding-not especially Topher Grace (recognizable from
That '70s Show
and now,
In Good Company
), who is really only required to be confused and enthusiastic-but notably Lois Smith in her few scenes, waving a trowel at her garden plot and telling Louise she only needs to take care of what's right in front of her.
Themes of codependency underlie much of
p.s.
, subtly and overtly. Twice people tell Louise to "work the problem," and accuse her of being caught in her own victimhood: "Dignity is a choice." It would be easy for the film to depict Louise as a self-righteous harpie but Linney reaches beneath Louise's martyred exterior to the heart of a woman starving for relationship-or, as her best friend (a trifle overplayed by Marcia Gay Harden) sums up her plight, "Some people just refuse to let anything good happen to them."
