How does the movie sideways end

The film reveals vulnerabilities, insecurities, not-so-occasional miscalculations, but it also makes us care about its people while recognizing that they, like the rest of us, are nothing if not flawed. Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael has given it a bright look, Rolfe Kent has provided an inviting jazz score, and even the smallest characters are expertly cast thanks to casting director John Jackson.

But again and again it is the four leads whose performances make all the difference. As the self-doubting Miles, a man for whom every night is the dark night of the soul, Giamatti makes the best use of his querulous persona, investing an unerring comic touch in a character who is genuinely anguished.

This is especially true of Maya, a character who carries the burden of being its most humane voice. Though her resume is extensive, she never seemed to quite get the opportunity to fulfill those early dreams. And now she has. In a town noticeably lacking in happy endings, it must be gratifying for her and for all the actors who come to Los Angeles hoping to find material as exceptional as this and a director who believes they have the ability to handle it.

Director Alexander Payne. Producer Michael London. Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael. Editor Kevin Tent. Costumes Wendy Chuck. Jack, for his part, just seems to enjoy being out in the world, with his buddy, having fun. Not for nothing, but the one time we see Jack teaching Miles, when they're out golfing, he's enthusiastic and encouraging regardless of how bad Miles is.

The other half of the film's quartet are the two women the boys run into: Maya Virginia Madsen, who'd been mucking about for years, and at 42 was at the worst possible age for a woman in the American film industry who wasn't an established star , a waitress at a restaurant in Buellton with a love of wine that can give Miles a run for his money, and Stephanie Sandra Oh, a year before Grey's Anatomy premiered , a wine pourer at one of the local vineyards.

But Sideways is already trying its luck at minutes, and it's easier to imagine a broader psychological canvass bloating the film and breaking its delicate mood. Besides, even as largely functional characters, Maya and Stephanie still get plenty of shading and complexity; Maya, in particular, is front-and-center in the film's justifiably best-loved scene, in which she and Miles offer competing theories for how Wine Is Life.

It's also rather impressive that a film which never joins the women's POV - never really departs from Miles, actually; it's basically a third-person limited narration done in movie form the book was first-person from Miles's perspective - positions us so thoroughly on their side, mostly by letting us watch in some small amount of horror as Miles and Jack behave abominably and give themselves leave to do so without moral self-reflection.

It's such a damn smart script; precise and elegant in its deployment of none-too-subtle metaphors, offering line after line of erudite but not showy dialogue that Giamatti and Madsen play in a variety of restrained tones Giamatti even makes the broad-as-a-barn gibe "I am not drinking any fucking Merlot! There are some odd digressions in the last third or so, including a lengthy passage that seems to exist primarily because Payne had previously gotten mileage out of a fat naked person and wanted to do it again, but the first half is airtight, capturing the cadences of adults of very different temperaments talking around all the things they want to say, spiked with just enough barbs for Giamatti to fling at Church that we remember that we are, after all, watching a comedy.

And it's Giamatti's best performance, too it's everybody's best performance, let's not be coy here , making the character real in all his desperate, angry hurt, with asking or at times, permitting us to like him. But his unlikability isn't the sourness of Election , but deeply human. The other lovely thing about Sideways is that it's really the only time in his career that Payne, a great director of actors and scripts, did much in the way of bringing some effective style to bear of course, Nebraska is filled top-to-bottom with style; I simply deny that it's "effective".

Not everything works; there are a few montages scattered here and there, and not one of them is actually good, but all have a distinctly banal, soulless quality, golden-toned shots of people having strenuously relaxed fun.

In some of these, Payne makes the astonishingly bad choice to include split-screens with the frames moving all around inside the main film frame, which only indicate that he's angry not to have been a filmmaker in the first half of the s, the last time that this could have been done with any chance of working non-ironically.

But get past that, and Sideways is a pretty sharp looking thing. It's handily the best-looking film ever shot by Phedon Papamichael, who uses a great deal of aggressive backlighting, complete with blown-out lens flares, to capture something of the essence of the California sun.

In fact, this is a tremendous love letter to the Santa Ynez Valley and the laconic little towns there, all of them feeling strangely untouched by time, like life and aesthetics and culture stopped evolving in the '70s at least in when the film was shot. The last time I was there myself was , and it certainly had that "welcome to " vibe; but then, more places did in the '90s than now , when the California wine industry burst into international consciousness.

It makes for an excellent place to set a film: the landscape is gorgeous, naturally is any crop so photogenic as vines? But I was, anyway, going someplace quite different: the little grace notes of how Payne stages action, using depth to strongly accentuate the way that the characters inhabit the spaces where they're comfortable. Or the film's least-subtle moment, in which a very drunk Miles claws his way from the back of shot into the front, out-of-focus the whole way, a neat little way to emphasise inebriation that's as ham-fisted as Miles himself in that moment.

It's quite nimbly done. The film is charming and handsome, and so invested in figuring out its characters even when they're being crap, it's not at all hard to see why it was loved. The women are not plot conveniences, but elements in a complex romantic and even therapeutic process.

Miles loves Maya and has for years, but cannot bring himself to make a move because romance requires precision and tact late at night, not Miles' peak time of day. Jack lusts after Stephanie, and casually, even cruelly, fakes love for her even as he cheats on his fiancee.

What happens between them all is the stuff of the movie, and must not be revealed here, except to observe that Giamatti and Madsen have a scene that involves some of the gentlest and most heartbreaking dialogue I've heard in a long time. They're talking about wine. He describes for her the qualities of the pinot noir grape that most attract him, and as he mentions its thin skin, its vulnerability, its dislike for being too hot or cold, too wet or dry, she realizes he is describing himself, and that is when she falls in love with him.

Women can actually love us for ourselves, bless their hearts, even when we can't love ourselves. She waits until he is finished, and then responds with words so simple and true they will win her an Oscar nomination, if there is justice in the world. Some terrible misunderstandings and even worse understandings take place, tragedy grows confused with slapstick, and why Miles finds himself creeping through the house of a fat waitress and her alarming husband would be completely implausible if we had not seen it coming every step of the way.

Happiness is distributed where needed and withheld where deserved, and at the end of the movie we feel like seeing it again. He finds plots that service his characters, instead of limiting them.

The characters are played not by the first actors you would think of casting, but by actors who will prevent you from ever being able to imagine anyone else in their roles. Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from until his death in In , he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

Rated R for language, some strong sexual content and nudity. Paul Giamatti as Miles. Thomas Haden Church as Jack. Virginia Madsen as Maya.