Shot in 2004 and estimated to cost around $12 million, Life by a Glass of Wine is directed by director Alexander Perth. The protagonist of the story, Miles, is a failed writer who makes a living by teaching English. His friend Jack is a small TV actor. Before Jack is about to get married, he and Gyals embark on a journey to California Wine country.
A vacation trip for two friends
Two longtime friends, Miles (Paul Giamatti) and Jack (Thomas Haden Church), set off from San Diego and drove all the way to the wine regions of central California for a week-long vacation. The rationale for the trip was to celebrate jack's first marriage in a week's time.
As a wine connoisseur, Miles revisits his familiar wine-producing regions. When visiting the vineyards, Miles makes no secret of his appreciation of wine. The aspiring but yet unpublished writer uses a lot of the proprietary vocabulary of the viticulture industry in his speech to mask the fact that he has been under the influence of his long-standing alcoholism and has so far been unable to recover from the blows of divorce two years ago.
Harvest love
In "The Horse Pile Restaurant", Miles meets the blonde waitress Maya (Virginia Madsen). In his vague memory, the woman shared the "love of wine" with himself. But now, lacking in self-confidence, he politely declined Maya's interest in him.
Jack makes it clear that the purpose of his trip is to keep himself and his old friends happy. Jack easily hooks up with a free-spirited single mother, Stephanie (Sandra Wu) who rides her motorcycle. She was a friend of Maya's and worked as a waitress in the local vineyards. So the two men and women both went on a date at Stephanie's house.
Soon, Jack and Stephanie fall in love. But Jack deliberately did not mention that he was about to get married, but instead repeatedly expressed his love for Stephanie, even planning to relocate there and do the wine business with her. Miles also allowed Jack to lie that his novel was about to be published, and at the right time, managed to attract Maya by having her read his manuscript of the novel. But when their lies are exposed, the plot of the movie takes a sharp turn.
Typical American road piece
There is no doubt that two people travel to a specific area, which is in line with the characteristics of Hollywood road movies in the United States.
In the style of a road movie, Miles and Jack, two unlikely friends, travel together through California's wine-growing regions to spend a week of free time together before Jack's ceremony. According to the general principle, the common combination of American road movies is to let a shy introvert travel with another emotional extrovert, which can reflect the rich connotation of the film and increase the fun of cleanliness. However, it should be noted that the different views and needs of two people will inevitably lead to many conflicts.
In-depth reflection on the midlife crisis
In this film, both men develop deep self-doubt, or midlife crisis, over the course of their respective lives, which triggers their thoughts on life. However, their response is to escape reality in different forms. Behind the two friends' vacation trip, they used their footprints to uncover their thoughts on the midlife crisis.
Miles plays an introvert in the film who pursues casual moments of tasting high-quality Portuguese wine, while Jack is an emotional extrovert who only wants to go on dates with women. Both of these methods belong to the "shortcuts" that ordinary people choose to deal with life problems, which is the famous director Robert Altman, who perfectly shows the "shortcuts" to many problems in another film he directed, "Life Intersection".
The English title "Sideways" of "Life with a Glass of Wine" is derived from the English word going sideways, which means to be stuck, to stop moving, and to have the meaning of stagnation.
Culturally rich lines
In addition, the script of this film is very wise, and the lines are full of cultural heritage (perhaps because the film is based on a novel). All the scenes are perfectly performed by the director. One of them stands out in particular:
During their evening date, when Maya asks Miles what he likes most and why, Miles talks unsuspectingly about his love of wine. He didn't realize that when he talked with relish about the weakness of the grapes and what kind of care and nurturing was needed to unleash the grape's potential, Miles was actually talking about himself. Maya realized this, and so did we in the audience: Miles was a man who was not good at properly expressing his self-appreciation.
In the same scene, Maya goes on to talk about the "life" of a bottle of wine:
"It's alive. I like to think about what happens during the year the grapes are growing: whether the sun was so bright and whether it rained. I like to think about people who have cultivated and picked grapes. If it was an old bottle of wine, many of the people who made it would be gone now. I think about the process of constantly changing wine. For example, if I open a bottle of wine today, the taste of this bottle of wine will be different from the wine I opened every day before, because in my eyes, a bottle of wine is alive and not dead. It is constantly evolving, adding to its complex connotations. That is, until its peak moment... Then it began to decline steadily, inevitably. ”
Maya is also talking about herself indirectly when she talks about the change in a bottle of wine. Director and screenwriter Alexander Payne taunts the arrogant rhetoric of the wine-tasting elite, while also using wine as a symbol of nature, a metaphor for how people become more elegant as they age and how to seize the best moment before the peak of their lives.
epilogue:
The development of "A Glass of Wine Life" ends with Miles finally deciding to find a new opposite-sex confidant to overcome his pain, because the ex-wife who was his ideal drinking partner is remarried, and Miles can no longer hope for her. There are not many good comedies, and comedies like this film that are full of laughter and believable life choices without losing the characters are even rarer.