Rosé-Tinted Glasses

"Is Wine-Soaked Film Too, Um, Rosé?" asks the New York Times, in what may be the first story on "Sideways" that asks "alcohol treatment professionals" what they think of the movie. Their conclusion, not surprisingly, is that most "Sideways" viewers (which, at this point, includes just about every American 17 or older) don't recognize that the protagonist in the road-tripping, wine-filled comedy is an alcoholic. Audiences might laugh at Miles's missteps with Maya, Merlot phobia ("If anyone orders Merlot, I'm leaving!"), and memorable--if miserable--musings ("I'm a smudge of excrement on a tissue surging out to sea with a million tons of raw sewage").
As Roger Ebert puts it, "He's not an alcoholic, you understand; he's an oenophile, which means he can continue to pronounce French wines long after most people would be unconscious."
For recovering alcoholics and the people who treat them, though, his behavior is no laughing matter, apparantly. (Stephan Gonzalez, coordinator at an adult treatment program of the Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse in Santa Barbara, Calif., says in the Times story that Miles's behavior shows a lack of control that makes him, if not an outright addict, an alcohol abuser, "all under the wonderful guise of sophisticated social drinking.")
I think they've got a point. But to me, the real tragedy of Miles's life is that drinking is all he's got. As Mireya Navarro writes in the New York Times, "Miles may be all thumbs when it comes to writing and women, but when the subject is wine, he is a poet of pinot noirs and just about every other grape he meets on an alcohol-fueled road trip through the Santa Barbara wine country."
Drinking and describing wine appear to be the only things Miles is good at. So it shouldn't be much of a surprise that he does a lot of both. Whether his drinking keeps him from achieving the success he wants in his professional and personal life isn't clear. In fact, it is his love of wine that helps him find common ground (and woo) his love interest, Maya. As for his professional aspirations, alcohol seems to have been more of a balm than a barrier.
And look at Hemingway and Bukowski--both of whom Miles cites as writers he admires (or, at least, quotes). Alcohol doesn't seem to have hindered--and, in fact, may have helped--the writing careers of some of the most-esteemed writers of the last century.
Ernest Hemingway reportedly drank a quart of whiskey a day during the last 20 years of his life. And in “A Brief Life of Fitzgerald,” Matthew J. Bruccoli writes "the dominant influences on F. Scott Fitzgerald were aspiration, literature, Princeton, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, and alcohol." (He adds: "His reputation as a drinker inspired the myth that he was an irresponsible writer; yet he was a painstaking reviser whose fiction went through layers of drafts.")
During World War II, beat poet Charles Bukowski was a skid row alcoholic. "If you are going to write, you have to have something to write about," he said. "The gods were good. They kept me on the street."
But alcohol has turned Miles instead into a 40-something man who steals from his mother to buy booze, sits alone at a bar drinking until he stumbles home half-blind, and swallows wine straight from the spit bucket. "No wonder his unpublished novel is titled The Day After Yesterday; for anyone who drinks a lot, that's what today always feels like," writes Ebert.