February 20, 2005
Sideways or Backward?
What to Make of Hollywood Before Oscar Night
by Honora Howell Chapman
Private Papers

Now that the Hollywood Foreign Press have declared Sideways the winner of Golden Globe awards as best musical/comedy and best screenplay, and the Academy has nominated it for best picture, I’ve got a bone to pick with the muse and her critics.

Sideways, a Californian Odyssey, certainly has its truly hilarious moments, but these don’t balance out the film’s strange messages, especially those about women—women who turn out to be every bit as stereotypical as women in entertainment from decades ago (and certainly less interesting than Homer’s women!). The dozens of critics across the country who rate this film at the top of the list of all movies (according to the San Francisco Chronicle this week, at 9.4 out of 10) are much more mentally trapped in Leave-It-to-Beaver-land than they’d ever be willing to admit over a pinot noir.

Are these Boomer critics so engrossed in their own narcissism that they can’t see the profound emptiness of a movie like Sideways? The two main male characters are appalling (and yes, remarkably funny at times for this very reason)—pedantic, vain, shallow, mendacious, thieving, weak, etc.— and yet, the script rewards them in the end with a “happy” ending from the perspective of these men. I turned to friends right after it ended and said, “In Europe, this film would have ended much differently.” And yet it was the foreign critics who gave this film top honors. Maybe they saw it as a quintessentially American take on life—I don’t know.

What bothered me the most about this film (and the critics who rave) is that both men are rewarded with happy endings after they have mistreated mothers and then never show any real remorse for their actions. This is the essence of Boomer self-absorption. One steals from his own mom, who has little to spare; the other misleads a single mother and her child about his apparent “availability.” Also, the child is multiracial—is this in order to mark the woman some kind of “free spirit” and to explain away—without any words needed—the missing father who appears to have been African-American? What?! I found all of this so pseudo-hip and offensive that my bile rose the way it did when watching The Piano, another movie everyone was supposed to like because it was supposedly about female empowerment, but I, again, thought was simply rancid.  Having the single mom then physically assault the idiot bachelor-on-the-make isn’t exactly an affirmative action, unless you like violence. Geez, why didn’t they just give her a gun (very American) so she could finish the creep off?

The only “mom” in the movie who appears at all content is the pregnant ex-wife, a veritable Madonna (Mary Mother of God, not the performer) with a fuzzy glow about her, and she has her cookie-cutter hubby by her side. And the man who cheated on this Madonna when they were once married still ends up with an adoring and pretty muse by his side, hanging on his every written and spoken word, ready to prop up his (deservedly) fragile ego at every turn. Weird—as if I had turned on the TV, and it was 1965 again, except I don’t think people were so neurotic in 1965 on TV. We’ll just blame it on the Boomers, who were glued to that TV in 1965.

So, is Hollywood hell-bent on celebrating weak nobodies in Odyssey knock-offs? Not entirely. Walter Salles may have whitewashed Che Guevara’s early sexual escapades and avoided mention of his later revolutionary violence, but he has certainly delivered a lovely (and lovingly made) portrait of the young man’s wanderings through South America with his best friend in The Motorcycle Diaries. A far better film than Sideways, it celebrates young men whose quest leads them eventually to working at a leper colony. This may sound nauseating to those who don’t agree with the politics and later deeds of these men, but it really was remarkably beautiful nonetheless and well worth seeing.

We then have to consider whether Hollywood has the guts to offer the mean between the neurotic narcissists and the kind-hearted revolutionaries without weapons: a picture about people who show extraordinary courage in the face of revolutionary weapons. Thank goodness for Hotel Rwanda! If you haven’t seen it, go immediately—it’ll disappear from the monsterplex soon because only Don Cheadle has been nominated for best actor, and if he doesn’t win on February 27^th, this film will be gone from all but the art houses on the 28^th.

Hotel Rwanda has everything: a great script based on historical events, superb directing, fine sets and costumes, and most of all, splendid acting, especially by Cheadle, who appears in almost every scene with his magnificent depiction of steadiness and grace punctuated by fear and frustration, but never over the top, despite the horrific circumstances portrayed. You discover from the very beginning of this film that it’s going to be fundamentally about the lawyer’s question in the gospel of Luke, “And who is my neighbor?”—the set-up for the parable of the Good Samaritan. Hutu Power Radio signs off ominously with, “Stay Alert. Watch your neighbors.”

The film travels the spectrum of behavior towards one’s neighbors: violence towards them, fear of them, apathy towards them, and, most remarkably, care for them, even when not knowing their names. These are neighbors both on one’s own street and in the larger global village, connected back then in the 90s by phone and fax lines. And even more surprisingly, the movie doesn’t paint the corporate honchos in Belgium as evil-doers. And the U.N. is well-meaning, underpowered, and eventually helpful. Neighbors love neighbors. Amazing movie.