Sideways: A Portrayal of Two Friends Miles and Jack in a Midlife Crisis
Sideways is two hour tribute to drunk driving and friends who should all consider joining AA together. In it Jack, a voice-over advertisement actor, and Miles, the author of an unpublishable book, swing through California wine country. There they spend their time getting drunk and laid while trying to escape sordid reality -- Miles has just left a failed relationship with a controlling, belittling woman and Jack is about to enter one. The movie attempts to portray these two as realistic figures. The humor and pathos of the work is intended to emerge from the audience's sympathy and horror at their mid-life crisis and their awkward attempts to make their ways through life. Miles in particular is supposed to have a certain every-man charm, as seen in the fact that he has an ordinary lifestyle with an ordinary job (as a middle school English teacher) and his relatively conservative approach to sexuality. Despite the fact that Miles and Jack are obviously meant to appeal to the audiences experience, they share a lifestyle which is far removed from middle America. The variety of lifestyles that exist in so-called "everyday life" --and especially everyday life in California -- are so wide ranging that it is impossible to make any
Though Miles' enduring friendship with Jack can be seen as prototypical of the sort of relationships which endure between trouble-makers and their serious friends, one can also shift one's perspective and analyse the way that Jack continues to be Miles' friend. If one can overcome the fact that Jack is entirely abnormal with his adulterous ways, and imagine him as the normal one in the pair, one can see how the movie analyzes the friendship between a regular happy-go-lucky individual and a friend that has a constant state of depression stemming from his lack of success in life and marriage and an over-intellectualization of the world. Even as each of us may have friends that are troublemakers, it is also likely that we each have friends sunk in depression. Jack's case shows the difficulty of living with someone who refuses to help themselves, and also the way that such a friend can provide an opportunity to reassess one's own life. Miles keeps Jack a little more level-headed than he might be otherwise, and also gives a great object lesson as to the sort of life that Jack wants to avoid. Without Miles' interference, Jack may never have realized how important it was to actually commit to his marriage. There are several ways in which Miles and Jack are atypical of normative Americans. Most Americans do not have the sort of money it requires to take a week off and go driving through wine country, staying at expensive resorts and drinking entire bottles of wine which may be over $100 a bottle (going rates on wine from vineyards in the Napa area appear to be from the low twenties to almost $300 a bottle). Being a wine aficiando is certainly a little out of the league of most Americans. Of course, the movie portrays it being a little much for Miles too. He steals a great deal of money from his mother to cover the trip. (I lost track of his theft at around $500) Of course, most Americans are as unlikely to thieve from their elderly mother on her birthday as they are to have a sophisticated taste for wine. From Miles behavior in this movie, one senses there may be a connection there. In conclusion, the characters are far from normative. They suffer from a sort of moral prolapse that appears to have been brought on by too much money, wine, and the unhealthy moral air that presides in California. They are too over dramatic, oversexed (in Jack's case), and over funded to be normal Americans. Despite this, they obviously have some basis in human reality, for the shape of their friendship is such that one can see parallels to it in everyday life no matter in what sector of America one lives. categorical statements about it. It is surely likely that people precisely like Jack and Miles exist somewhere, for their dialogue and antics seem quite human, if not quite normative. However, the screenwriter's perception of how normal people in America live is obvious a little skewed. Their upper-class pretensions are not the only things which set Miles and Jack apart from the ordin
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Approximate Word count = 2023
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)
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