Alexander Payne and the Art of the Con

Alexander Payne and the Art of the Con
Like Alexander Payne? Well, too bad, because he hates you.
by Robert Flaxman

Few things are as troubling in the world of cinema as a filmmaker getting credit for something that he not only isn’t doing, but of which he’s doing effectively the opposite. Such is the case with Alexander Payne, a writer/director whose last two outings, About Schmidt and Sideways, have been by and large praised (the latter even more effusively so than the former) as being real human stories, and stories that aren’t told enough in film. The problem with this is that Payne isn’t making real human stories; if anything, his films represent life filtered through the lens of a misanthrope.

You’d think more people might have caught on after Payne’s 1999 film Election, consisting as it does of neurotic, miserable characters doing terrible things to others. The way the characters are lined up causes the film to lack a clear focus on traditional character arcs – Jim McAllister, played by Matthew Broderick, is the film’s main character, but he can hardly be said to be its protagonist unless all implied positive value is stripped from the word. McAllister cheats on his wife and attempts to rig a school election simply because he doesn’t like one of the candidates. Yet while the object of his ire, Tracy Flick (played by Reese Witherspoon), is not really an antagonist in the sense that McAllister’s hatred of her hardly seems deserved, she is not a favorable character either, as she seems willing to do anything in her quest to get ahead, including tearing down her opponent’s campaign posters.

Lacking anyone to root for, the film contents itself with cracking jokes at the expense of its characters’ miseries. McAllister’s viewing of pornography is played for laughs, as is the welt he receives after being stung by a bee. The relationship between Tracy and one of McAllister’s fellow teachers is played almost exclusively for laughs, even as it contributes to the ruined life of the latter. Another character’s scorned-lesbian anger is supposed to be hilarious.

This is in fact how Payne operates throughout all of his films, but Election is by far the least devious. Payne never pretends to have sympathy for these characters; at best they serve as metaphors, though what for is unclear. (The futility of taking on a system that rewards overachieving backbiters is suggested, but the person doing the taking on is so unlikable that this doesn’t mean much.) Because of this, the film never acts like it wants emotional connections, and so the audience is allowed to be in on the joke of how much it would suck to be any of these characters.

If that were all Payne’s films did, there wouldn’t be anything to complain about, really. Certainly no one would mistake him for a filmmaker with humanity if all his films were in the vein of Election. But with About Schmidt, Payne turned his attention to the plight of a man suffering a late-life crisis – and it was as Payne started to seem more human that he started to get especially nasty.

After all, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to depict a twilight-years existential crisis of the kind Warren Schmidt (played by Jack Nicholson) has in the film. Payne’s goal isn’t to depict the crisis, though; it’s to snicker at it while paying lip service to the notion that Schmidt is a decent human being trying to deal with a rough patch in his life.

Take the scene where Schmidt, on the road in his Winnebago, hangs out with a couple in their trailer. The husband goes out for a bit and Schmidt is left alone with the wife, who attempts to comfort him over the loss of his wife. Schmidt’s obvious need for companionship manifests itself not in, say, a good cry, but in his trying to force his tongue down the woman’s throat, in a scene clearly played for the hilarity of Schmidt’s awkwardness.

Schmidt then meets Roberta (played by Kathy Bates), the oversexed future mother-in-law of Schmidt’s daughter Jeannie. Schmidt stays with Roberta and her family prior to the wedding, and receives unwanted advances from Roberta, including a now-infamous scene where she climbs nude into a hot tub with him. Though he is in obvious need of female companionship, Schmidt flees. Why? Because Roberta is fat.

In this scene and so many others, Payne shows an obvious disdain for the people of Middle America his film is supposed to extol. Charles Taylor, as part of his contribution to the January 2005 edition of Slate’s Movie Club, described getting reader mail in reaction to About Schmidt: “I got letters from people in the Midwest who knew the movie was insulting them and felt justifiably offended that critics on either side of flyover land were talking about what a warm, humane film it was.”

Taylor agrees with those readers, and I agree with him. Roberta and her family, including Jeannie’s future husband Randall, are a bunch of dim bulbs – Randall explains a business venture of his with “A lot of people think it’s a pyramid scheme, but it’s not” – with questionable behavior, like the fact that Roberta breast-fed Randall until he was almost five. Roberta’s sexual openness is treated as repulsive because she isn’t a very attractive person – Bates’ nude scene plays either as funny or disgusting, but nothing else.

Schmidt comes right out and confronts Jeannie with a disgusted, “Look at these people!” Jeannie is not to be dissuaded, but when she seems so comparatively normal the obvious question is why she’s marrying such an obvious loser in the first place. The answer is that Payne views everyone in the film as various degrees of loser; Jeannie may be higher up the totem pole like her father, but she isn’t far enough up to escape degradation. In the same vein, Schmidt is made the butt of ridiculous jokes, such a farcical sequence where he hurts his back on a water bed and then spaces out after taking painkillers. It’s out of place with the film’s overall pacing and tone, but it squares with Payne’s goal of making his characters look as ridiculous as possible.

Schmidt looks even stupider as he spends the entire movie wondering, “What kind of difference have I made?” Pointedly, he puts the question into a letter he writes to the African child he sponsors. When a letter finally arrives from Africa at the end of the film, Schmidt breaks down crying at the realization that he has made at least this one difference. It might be touching if it weren’t so obvious, and if Payne hadn’t spent the whole film privately laughing at Schmidt for not figuring it out. The audience doesn’t get to be in on the joke in this film unless it can see past Payne’s window dressing. By including characters for both Schmidt and the audience to find ridiculous, Payne props Schmidt up as the character the audience should be relating to, but undercuts that by making him into a complete buffoon. Most people only seemed to see the sadness behind his buffoonery, however, and assumed Payne was running with that angle. He wasn’t, though. The sadness is what you’d get if Schmidt were a real person; because he’s a movie character, Payne is free to exploit his suffering in any way he wants.

Payne’s latest, Sideways, has become the critical hit of 2004. Of 166 reviews compiled by the website Rotten Tomatoes, only six have been judged “rotten”, and of those Taylor is the only critic with any real name recognition. Sideways creates even more feeling for its characters than Schmidt could manage, but in doing so it only feels more phony, for behind the emotions, Payne is simply at it again.

Seemingly incapable of creating a main character he doesn’t plan to laugh at, Payne centers Sideways around Miles (played by Paul Giamatti). Miles is a depressing person – an English teacher who takes no pride in his job (represented by the fact that we don’t even know it until the end of the film), he is a failed novelist who can’t get published because his book is an overlong mess, a failed husband depressed over the news that his ex-wife is already getting remarried, and a drunk who hides his addiction behind a knowledge of wine.

Miles manages to come off as something of a likable character, but it’s not because Payne actually makes him likable – it’s because he pairs him with Miles’ friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church), an overgrown frat boy so hideously unlikable that the audience and Miles find themselves rolling their eyes at the same time. Well, now we have something in common!

True to form, though, Payne exploits Miles. His excessive drinking is frequently played for laughs, and his knowledge of wines is made to look snobby and posturing, especially since we know he isn’t really a very cultured guy. When Miles gives a speech on his appreciation for the pinot noir grape, however, suddenly he’s supposed to sound profound – perhaps just because he’s talking to a woman? It’s a cheap device if true, but I suspect Payne doesn’t buy into it. Instead, he uses it to create a false sympathy, then continues to turn the screws by handing Miles humiliation after humiliation, right up until the last 30 seconds or so of the film. Payne doesn’t just hate Miles, he hates us too – he gains our sympathy for the character by making Jack such a creep, and then makes us feel awful by beating that character down. Nothing truly good is allowed to happen to Miles onscreen; there is hope in the film’s final shot, but we cut away before it can be fulfilled – thus leaving the tantalizing possibility that it could be dashed.

Payne also gets in some more digs at fat people, whom he apparently despises. Poking fun at a chubby waitress with jokes better used in Porky’s, Payne then documents an expedition on which Miles and Jack must retrieve the latter’s wedding rings from her house (as Jack had to flee when the waitress’s husband came home). Never mind that Payne actually tries to peddle Jack as an okay guy here after spending the rest of the film selling us on his status as a jerk – the bigger problem is the way the married couple is treated. The idea that the waitress was chubby was intended as funny in the first place, but the scene in which she is seen having sex with her equally fat husband is played exclusively for laughs, as is that husband’s naked dash into the street. Like Roberta in About Schmidt, these are disgusting people who can never hope to be sexual beings because of their physical appearance alone. Did Payne get beat up by chubby kids on the playground as a young lad? His disdain for them is equaled by a disdain for their Middle-American living conditions; for someone who grew up in Omaha, Payne sure seems to hate that very general style of living.

So what did people see in Sideways? As with About Schmidt, the idea that Payne was ridiculing his main character while feigning sympathy doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone – and sure, if the ridicule slides by, Payne’s false emotion is convincing enough to hold interest. Some of the ridicule is surpassingly obvious, but if you write the film off as a comedy, the contradiction between the apparent sympathy for Miles and the clear mockery of him doesn’t need to exist, as the latter can be justified for comedic purposes. I don’t think it can, though. If Payne genuinely wants us to sympathize with Miles, he shouldn’t have made him such a lowlife – the guy’s main virtue is that he’s not Jack (he even says as much to his love interest).

Payne doesn’t want that, though. At its very best, Sideways is a parody of a buddy movie, but the parody, as with the way the characters are drawn, is exceedingly mean-spirited. At its very worst, the film fakes caring about its characters just so it can make fun of them some more. Even the characters who escape mockery – Virginia Madsen’s Maya and Sandra Oh’s Stephanie – are forced to pair off with the two leading men, who are as unpleasant as anything. The idea that Maya could find Miles attractive when all he does is mope around and get drunk, solely because he knows something about wine, is forced; Stephanie’s relationship with Jack is just degrading, and she is cast aside as soon as the film no longer has a use for her. If Payne really likes his lead characters, the way the women are treated would make him look misogynist – but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, in that I think he hates them all equally.

Miles the elitist drunk, Jack the walking erection, and the women forced to put up with them. That sounds like a cast of characters worth caring about, doesn’t it? No, it doesn’t to me either, and that’s because it’s not – it’s a cast of characters whose lives are mocked again and again. Payne doesn’t show us Miles’ potential redemption at the end of the film because he doesn’t care; there’s nothing to poke fun at in that moment.

It’s disappointing, in a way. Payne and his writing partner Jim Taylor sometimes craft good dialogue, and they occasionally find their way to scenes that feel sublime if you pretend they’re happening in a better movie. What’s more, they clearly have the ability to make audiences care about their characters – it’s just a shame that it’s a trick. Payne could really make a great film one day if he decides to embrace his characters rather than seeing how many punchlines he can squeeze out of them. If we can drag this misanthrope over to the light side of the force, perhaps his powers may yet be used for the good of a truly human film, rather than the evil of films whose false humanism is just a subtle way of telling us that Alexander Payne doesn’t like anybody.