How does sideways end

In the meantime, Miles encounters a woman he never expected to meet. Maya and Miles really hit it off with each other especially over their shared love of good wine and they start to develop a relationship.

Luckily for Jack, Maya knows a local wine keeper, Stephanie, played by Sharon Oh , who has a lot of the characteristics that Jack likes in a woman.

The two men end up dating and hooking up with both women but with unforeseen and negative consequences. Miles also suffers during this trip from the lack of hope for his novel in finding a publisher to sell and advertise it. He also struggles to give up on his ex-wife, Vicki, who he did cheat on leading to their divorce and breakup.

The almost breaking point for Miles comes when he finds out that his ex-wife, Vicki, got re-married and has a newborn daughter causing him to regret his divorce from her. Despite all of mid-life struggles that both Miles and Jack go through during the film, they remain loyal and true friends despite the pain and suffering they cause each other.

Miles and Jack are almost complete opposites of each other in terms of their personality and character. Miles is serious yet forlorn and an intelligent, well-spoken man while Jack is a cocky womanizer who never really grew out of his teenage years.

However, despite their differences from each other, they do help lift each other out from their problems. Jack gives Miles encouragement to keep working on his novel and to self-publish it if he has to.

He wants Miles to succeed at starting a relationship with Maya and really gets him to start going out with her. Each of these characters has their own personal demons with Miles having depression and a lack of success in his passion and Jack being an adulterer and a compulsive liar. While they are not perfect men and the women they are involved with make that clear to them, they are still good guys at heart and want to do the right thing.

They are endearing to us as the audience because they make mistakes and have setbacks just like those of us watching the film. In addition to the brilliant acting especially by Virginia Madsen, Paul Giamatti, and Thomas Haden Church, the adapted screenplay is brilliantly written and thought out. Even though most viewers would consider it a dark, morose film, it also has a lot of comedy in it and some great lines about wine. It's a movie that prefers for its audience to be reasonably well-versed in one of the most famously esoteric, costly, and elitist hobbies on the planet.

It snagged five Oscar nominations including Best Picture winning for Best Adapted Screenplay , which was at the time regarded as a mildly surprising under-performance relative to how crazy in love with the film critics were. As they might well be: Sideways is all about the exquisite pleasures of being over-educated a subject and the ecstasy of having the vocabulary to express what makes it so particularly good; also about being a bookish, socially awkward white man of around This does not, of course, explain why it struck a chord with audiences, and for that I think we have to go to that old chestnut, Great Characters, because the simple fact of the matter is that, buried underneath its exhaustive fascination with California wine country and wine itself, Sideways is a beautiful little chamber dramedy about four sharply-drawn characters played with a very lovely mixture of nuance and showmanship, by an unimpeachable cast made up of actors that absolutely nobody saw coming in The film's a sort of a road movie, centered on two weirdly mismatched friends.

Miles Paul Giamatti, catapulting from "That Guy" character actordom into mainstream prominence, a year after American Splendor put him on the map with critics is an attempted novelist reeling from a two-year-old divorce, and obsessed with wine to the point that it genuinely appear sto be the only thing he loves that this allows him to semi-invisibly self-medicate with alcohol is obviously a happy accident.

He's arranged a weeklong trip with his best friend Jack Thomas Haden Church, then best-remembered, if at all, as the designated Extreme Moron on the s sitcom Wings , a former TV actor now working as commercial voiceover artist, and a relentless, amoral horndog a week away from his wedding.

The mere subject of their trip speaks volumes about what kind of men they are and how their relationship functions: Miles is taking Jack to the vineyards of Santa Barbara County to teach him how to appreciate wine, in a rather superior, "you poor idiot child" fashion.

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. Jack is a big, blond, jovial man at the peak of fleshy middle-aged handsomeness, and Miles looks like -- well, if you know who Harvey Pekar is, that's who Giamatti played in his previous movie. But Jack and Miles have been friends since they were college roommates, and their friendship endures because together they add up to a relatively complete person.

Miles, as the best man, wants to take Jack on a weeklong bachelor party in the California wine country, which makes perfect sense, because whatever an alcoholic says he is planning, at the basic level he is planning his drinking.

Jack's addiction is to women. Jack Thomas Haden Church is a not very successful actor; he tells people they may have heard his voice-over work in TV commercials, but it turns out he's the guy who rattles off the warnings about side-effects and interest rates in the last five seconds. The two men set off for wine country, and what happens during the next seven days adds up to the best human comedy of the year -- comedy, because it is funny, and human, because it is surprisingly moving.

Of course they meet two women. Maya Virginia Madsen is a waitress at a restaurant where Miles has often stopped in the past, to yearn but not touch. She's getting her graduate degree in horticulture, and is beautiful, in a kind way; you wonder why she would be attracted to Miles until you find out she was once married to a philosophy professor at Santa Barbara, which can send a woman down market in search of relief. The next day they meet Stephanie Sandra Oh , a pour girl at a winery tasting room, and when it appears that the two women know each other, Jack seals the deal with a double date, swearing Miles to silence about the approaching marriage.

Miles has much to be silent about. He has been in various forms of depression for years, and no wonder, since alcohol is a depressant. He is still in love with his former wife and mourns the bliss that could have been his, if he had not tasted his way out of the marriage. Although his days include learned discourses about vintages, they end with him drunk, and he has a way of telephoning the poor woman late at night. One of its lovely qualities is that all four characters are necessary.

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.