With so much of Hollywood’s output drowning in a cesspool of its own construction (I can’t remember a period when so many American films haven’t even been worth commenting upon), it is no fun to  report on the failure of “Sideways,” the latest from writer-director Alexander Payne and his writing partner Jim Taylor.  One can only hope that this dispiriting letdown is only a bump on the road following such gems as 2002’s About Schmidt and 1999’s Election.

     As they did with Schmidt, Payne and Taylor have shaped their newest film as a road movie, although with another twist of the nuptial sundial.  Whereas Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson), was largely involved in motoring to his daughter’s wedding following the death of his own wife, the two main characters of Sideways are exploiting the last days of one’s bachelorhood.

     Miles (Paul Giamatti), a morose, unpublished novelist working as an eight-grade teacher in San Diego, is taking his college buddy Jack (Thomas Haden Church), a moderately successful actor, from the latter’s home in Los Angeles and on through a good portion of California wine country as a substitute for a bachelor party.  Whatever shortcomings he may have, Miles is a wine connoisseur of utmost dedication and expertise.  But he also drinks to get drunk and, to all intents and purposes, is an alcoholic.

     Sideways shies away from labeling Miles as a lush per se and, like Miles himself, chalks up his excess drinking to the sensitive sad sack’s divorce two years earlier.  The experience put the writer manqué into an emotional despond that he shows no desire to escape.

     As for Jack, he’s a blithe live-for-today hedonist, and to Miles’s shock, intends to have as much premarital sex as he can cram into seven days.  Jack strikes sexual paydirt when he hooks up with spunky Stephanie (Sandra Oh), a winery employee and friend of the more soulful Maya (Virgina Madsen), a waitress at a classy restaurant who is a longtime acquaintance of Miles and a budding connoisseur herself.  When he manages to rouse himself from drunken displays of depression, Miles contemplates his own liaison with Maya; alas, she’s just gotten out of a long-term relationship and is in no hurry to get into  another serious situation.  And everything Miles does is serious, or at least somber.

     Payne approaches this material with the ingenuity that has become a virtual hallmark.  Just as an example, he uses a split-screen – split into double or quadruple images – on Miles and Jack as they motor north.  Although you might not notice it, the complementary, simultaneous frames share the same perspective; everything is filmed as if from the point-of-view of a silent, non-judgmental observer sitting in-between the two men.  This gives the technique, which has been largely a useless flourish in the past, an emotional grounding, as the two men are assessed, even in silent moods, as equals.

     This show of evenhandedness extends to dialogue and performance as well.  When, after one seduction too many, Miles excoriates Jack for his infidelity to his fiancée, the normally casual Jack responds with a low-volume but intense comment that, as smart as Miles may be, he doesn’t understand Jack’s needs.  The subdued urgency, displayed with an off-angle close-up, and with a nice finish by the normally wooden Church, are all testament to Payne’s superior talent.

     But the movie’s fatal flaw is that, though it appears to be about four characters, it’s really only about one: Miles.  Simply put, the supporting trio around Miles function as no more than a mirror for him.  One of the movie’s crucial scenes comes when, late at night, Miles and Maya have a postprandial tête-à-tête.  Maya asks Miles why he loves wine and he responds with a poetic evocation of life, nurturing, and growth.  While he does so, Payne gives us significant shots of Maya as her gaze goes from interested to infatuation.  Maya gets to give her own assessment of wine’s philosophic essence, but Miles doesn’t respond with a corresponding emotional back flip.  After all, he is already in love with Maya.

     The crux of this scene encapsulates Sideways’s central flaw.  We are seduced into accepting Miles’s superiority because Payne had quickly jettisoned the judicious split perspective of the split-screen sequence.  More and more – and speedily – the camera’s viewpoint merges completely with Miles’s perspective until it squeezes out any competing attitude.  This shift achieves a finality in a restaurant scene in which Miles is making a drunken fool of himself.  He excuses himself to do what Jack had been warning him against: Making a drunken and recriminating phone call to his ex-wife.  But by the time he’s into the call, Payne has pushed his camera right up into Miles’s face for the tightest close-up of the entire movie.  That move insures that, just as Miles’s face obliterates everything else from view, so the possibility that Miles is merely pathetic, rather than sympathetic, is obscured.

     So, in the scene with Maya, we don’t need a shot  depicting Miles’s attention while Maya talks.  Any question of watching how he responds to Maya – or to anyone else – is mooted by the by-now automatic assumption that Miles occupies the moral, though not social or romantic, high ground.  Miles has to adjust his behavior in order to stop alienating people and to curb his drinking in order to claim control of his emotions.  But his stance as the fulcrum  on which everyone else’s character is judged is established relatively early and never questioned.  When Maya’s look turns adoring while Miles prattles on about grapes, it’s a sign that not Miles, but Maya has become worthy.

     Sideways is an unfortunate example of a successful artist – Payne (and Taylor) – expressing a mystifying self-pity through the plight of an unsuccessful artist.  The chance that any other character will achieve an autonomous dramatic existence is capped by the project’s very nature.  And the chance that Miles, as a figure, will embody any truly challenging characteristic, is squelched.