I'm a lonely person in general, I think. Whether by nature or by custom at this point, I'm drawn to the aesthetics and vibes of being alone and departing from others. I love moments in film when people walk away after realizing that they no longer belong with someone, like the endings of Withnail and I or Frank. Lyrics in songs about friends and lovers leaving run through my head more than the catchy riffs from those same songs: “Everybody's gone, and I've been here for too long” from blink-182's “Dammit,” “Everybody that loves you will be leaving someday soon” from Bomb the Music Industry!'s “Everybody That Loves You.” Of all the classic American novels, The Great Gatsby sticks with me the strongest in large part due to how it treats the short-lived and never-substantial-enough ties we hold with the people in our lives.
But lately—and maybe it's delayed COVID isolation, or the particular kind of distance one feels living in an area that's somehow designated beyond rural—dealing with loneliness has been especially difficult for me.
I've never had many close friends, but I used to have a few. I also used to have groups I was able to exist within comfortably. Now, I have a lot of people I would like to see more of and people I was once close with. Friends and acquaintances aplenty, but few really deep ties anymore. Things change between people and they can't go back to the way they were. Some have developed into lives with priorities like making a family that I will never understand, and I can feel us drifting from the ground we once shared in common. That kind of change is natural, inevitable—but boy I wish I could find something to refill that void. I wish I had the fortitude to just get out there and tell people “I want to be your friend, what do you want to talk about?” when it feels right.
I haven't had a really, deeply close friend in a long time. I'm in a committed and happy relationship, but romantic love isn't and shouldn't be everything. We all know it's more difficult to become friends with people as you get older, and it's tough to reach out and build those connections, and it's especially strenuous if you're like me and can't seem to connect to most people on first contact. And, frankly, so many of my friendships have developed from sheer circumstance—people I've shared dorms with or who happened to go on the same school trips. People with whom I've become close because we were literally close. You can't intentionally recreate serendipitous bonds like that.
This comes a long way toward bringing me to Alexander Payne's Sideways, a movie you've probably at least heard about, based on a not-as-good Rex Pickett novel of the same name. It's about wine and straight male friendship. It has been one of my favorite movies since early high school.
I've heard humorless media scolds on Twitter and freshly socially conscious feminists denounce Sideways as an annoying white male problems movie. They're not completely wrong, but, like, way to adhere to the Franciscan ideal for compassion for all God's creatures there. And the white male problems we're talking about are alcoholism, clinical depression, failure, feeling insignificant and unaccomplished, and the difficulties of reaching out and finding meaning in human connection. So I'm not sure what the complaint is.
Anyway. Chip on shoulder aside, the appeal of Sideways is the main duo, former roommates and best friends since college Miles (Paul Giamatti) and Jack (Thomas Haden Church). Miles is a school teacher and wine snob, hoping against hope that his enormous semi-autobiograpical literary novel gets published. Jack is an out-of-work actor who used to do soap operas and infomercials, about to get married and looking for one last hedonistic hurrah before settling into domestic life. Where the newlyweds will get a honeymoon, Jack spends his time prior to the wedding on a wine country tour with Miles, who is in many ways closer to him than his fiancée.
Sideways, much like its spiritual predecessor Withnail and I, speaks to the sweetness that can arise from dysfunctional male friendship. And the importance of that kind of relationship in one's life aside from romance. It's a different kind of intimacy that's no less powerful or meaningful.
It might be problematic to say, but I feel like you can be a little bit worse of a person to your friends than your partner. Problems that may need concentrated working out to heal in a relationship can be healed with time and distance in a friendship. It's easier to forgive friends for their flaws and to learn to work around them.
There's a scene partway through the movie where the pair is golfing (appalling, I know, but stick with me). Miles is feeling down about the prospects of his book getting published. Jack, with his “do first, think later” attitude, tells him to just self-publish and get it in the hands of the public. He chides Miles for being so self-defeating about the whole process. All the while he's condescendingly teaching Miles how to play golf, infuriating Miles to the point where he starts screaming at Jack to shut up. Jack says, in Church's inimitable SoCal surfer dude accent, “I know you're a little frustrated with your life right now but you can choose to be less hostile.”
Then impatient golfers behind them hit a ball into their course, and the whole dynamic shifts.
Up until then, we see Jack overconfident and condescending, but well-intentioned. He's not interested in the minutiae of publishing the way Miles is—he doesn't stop to consider what an uphill battle it will be to self-publish a book and get it in readers' hands. He's just looking for solutions and encouraging Miles to pursue them. He wants Miles to be better, but has an aggravating way of doing it. And Miles knows this, which is why it's driving him crazy.
But now, Miles and Jack are united against a few jerkoffs on the course. And they set aside their squabble to show these guys what's what. Miles, channeling Jack's impulsiveness, drives a ball into the other group's golf cart. These golfers drive toward Miles and Jack, furious, and Jack, tag-teaming with Miles, runs toward them, screaming and flailing his club around.
It's a hilarious and subtly touching scene that casually demonstrates the intricacies at work in the dynamic between these two men, which is played out time and again in the movie through different situations. They bring out hidden characteristics within each other even as they're driving each other crazy—Jack with his posturing confidence and Miles with his woe-is-me shtick. Strained as things may sometimes get between the two of them, they're clearly more themselves around each other than they are with other people. And when you sift through all the bullshit they put each other through, they’re still there for each other.
Jack and Miles are shown to depend on each other, to really want to support each other, in ways that make the finale of the film that much more bittersweet for me. The wedding feels less like a celebration than a tearful goodbye, Miles seeing his best buddy off into a new life. Jack is leaving the kind of life he shared with Miles, one that they managed to sustain through college and beyond. Sure, they will probably be friends, but there's no guarantee that they, too, won't drift apart.
Sideways gives us a ray of hope by ending with a phone call from Miles' love interest Maya (Virginia Madsen), forgiving him for being party to a transgression of trust earlier in the film (Jack having an affair with Maya's friend Stephanie without telling her that he's getting married soon) and touched by his unpublished novel, which he gave her a draft of. With Rolfe Kent's beautiful, jazzy score settling into a mellow, melancholy, Bill Evans-tinged piano, Sideways ends with Miles knocking on Maya's door, a promise that their relationship may continue and that Miles won't be alone without Jack.
Nice as it is, Maya won't fill the void left in Miles' life by Jack. It might be better, might improve Miles in ways Jack's influence never could, but it won't be the same. Maybe it's sad, maybe it's not. These things happen all the time. But it's significant to me that Sideways puts friendship on that level, establishes that the non-romantic connections we keep are another, equally important facet of love.