I promised myself I wasn't going to do this, but...

An oblique way to view the 2004 election is through the lens of American cinema, and more specifically, through its depiction of the Red State/Blue State divide. For the most part, Hollywood has also been guilty of swinging from representative extremes. If one considers the way it chooses to present any place external to the megapolitan culture-domes of New York and Los Angeles, another polarity soon becomes apparent. Sometimes the marquees are lit up with unstinting hagiographies of self-sacrificing small town heroes, the misadventures of era-hopping, twanging retards, or the sweaty courtroom travails of enlightened Grishamite litigators. Other times, it's curtain-to-curtain lynch mobs, Gospel-mouthing Dixie housewives, or truckfuls of slack-jawed Klansmen who think Jim Crow was a liberal plot of Reconstruction.

Now consider how damned refreshing it was when Alexander Payne picked up a camera in the mid '90s. Here, finally, was someone who was establishing a reputation for not condescending to what Philip Larkin once condescendingly called the 'vast deserts of bigotry' that define American life between the coasts. Under Payne's smart storyboarding, there were complexities and intellectual refinements springing up all around fly-over country, so much so that one might actually consider landing there someday. Psychic torment in Omaha unrelated to the closing of a Wal-Mart? The hell, you say.

Not that the virtue of originality alone is enough to redeem art, but thankfully Payne made sure his films were also some of the acutest satires to be stamped on celluloid in decades.

And that's saying even more than it's saying given that his debut film, Citizen Ruth, was a comedy about one woman's funny embroilment in the abortion debate. If you can imagine Dead Man Walking: The Musical, you can see what kind of out-of-the-gate risks Payne was willing to take on as an unknown filmmaker. A rather well tapped cell within the honeycomb of 'American values,' which we're again hearing so much about, fetus flushing as a subject didn't seem doable without encountering serious problems. A dreaded but unspoken infamnia, as it became in the Godfather II; a yawning, party-stopping plot device, as it was used in the bad Manhattan-set Alfie remake -- sure. Yet for two hours, in Nebraska, abortion is tricky business indeed. At the very least, one expected cookie cutter homilies and ethical fault lines to be drawn the second the opening credits began to roll. How pleasant the discovery, then, that in Payne's Midwestern world pro-life and pro-choice extremists act with equal ugliness as agents of opposing politics but identical priorities, more worried about how their activism struts and preens than about the born or unborn humanity they endeavor to protect. And Laura Dern's strung-out, opportunistic Ruth isn't exactly portrayed as a cervical Joan of Arc... In fact, I can't remember a single unflawed or morally reliable character in the whole black comedic shebang, which, by any chromatic standard of comedy, ought to have had its audience reaching for a warm blanket of consensual reassurance. But nope. We were more capable than that, and Alexander Payne knew it. Citizen Ruth might have more credibly borne the tagline that was used by a later auteurist, albeit overrated, 'issue' film: No one gets away clean.

Or, while we're at it, unexamined. This set a CV precedent. Payne's follow-ups were two very brilliant movies, Election and About Schmidt, and they were just as immune to cant and sentimentality even though the budgets and frames of reference expanded widely. If you had to isolate Payne's major talent, you might say he's got a way with insinuating seamlessly the unexpected or unpredictable, as though ironic novelty were just another clichÈ in movies. In Election, it was the idiot jock -- nature and John Hughes' answer to the talking sphincter muscle -- that turned out to be the most affable and well-meaning character. (When you think about it, they do exist, don't they?) Then there was Matthew Broderick's mediocre schlub teacher... Neither we nor him could have predicted what latent but entitled strains of amorality he would have activated by a manipulative and freakishly annoying overachiever, the kind of female high school student Wes Anderson would make Jason Schwartzmann date instead of bury in a shallow grave. And, if for no other reason to rejoice over it (despite there being plenty), About Schmidt did two seemingly impossible things. It de-Jackified Jack, and it made seeing Kathy Bates naked a laughing matter.

So if from such heights of collar-loosening awkwardness and winning idiosyncrasy, a buddy road trip comedy seems like a tumble into the mundane, you should probably run right out and see Sideways, pronto. It's Payne's latest, and I think best, film to date.

Keeping with his sub theme of muted surprise-springing, Sideways is the first Payne film not set in Omaha. It's set in California. It's also the first film ever to take the ultimate red state revenge by toying with blue state stereotypes, yet not snidely or maliciously sending them up. This is almost Golden Rule filmmaking and the temptations for sadism Payne averts are practically evangelical in magnitude. You think I'm kidding? Within the first five minutes, the parodic arsenal has already been hauled out for what any heartland director could use for a cheap, bobo-busting good time: from the morning coffeehouse pop-in (complete with a spinach croissant order), to the New York Times crossword puzzle, the Xanax-medicated clinical depression, and -- perhaps the most lambent blue flag of all, not to mention a running conceit of Sideways -- the arch connoisseurship of wine. "Soupcon," "flutter of nutty cheese," "transcendent." As pertains to hooch talk, these are Yankee fightin' words, building toward some violent and nasty climax that, mercifully, never does come. (I can't have been the only one in the theatre to feel a mere wedge of brie away from a Kerry mandate.)

The wonderful Paul Giamatti plays Miles, a recently divorced sadsack intellectual and borderline vine-drunk with a novel that'll maybe get published soon. Miles is also the best man at his best friend Jack's (Thomas Hayden Church) upcoming wedding, and Sideways is the chronologue of the two's last hurrah bachelors' spree, which of course doesn't turn out the way they'd expect. But this being a Payne comedy, it doesn't always turn out the way you'd expect, either. And you've seen the trailer and know the playbook for this type of film inside-out and everything.

Miles and Jack hit the North California highway together in search of great wine and good golf, and, since Jack is a washed-up actor and the Oscar to Miles' (less fastidious) Felix, an easy pre-marital lay or twelve. Enter Sandra Oh and Virginia Madsen, Stephanie and Maya, both very bright and sexy and mavens for fine varietals, particularly when put to the service of casual courtship.

The danger inherent in a movie set around the consumption of a pretentious drug of choice is that the drug will become a pretentious metaphor for human characteristics. And here again, Payne delivers in making the only scene to get within cork-popping distance of realizing this danger the best scene in the whole film. It involves the self-hating and amorously reluctant Miles, de-escalating from a disastrous double date he didn't want to go on in the first place, was too distracted and morose to have enjoyed, and nearly terminated halfway through with a drunken phone call to his nice ex-wife.

Once Jack and Stephanie go off to fuck (sorry, it's not 'make love' to listen to their noises), Miles is left alone with Maya, someone he's superficially known as a waitress for a few years but would not have dared to ask out without Jack's ego-blind prodding. They're lounging on beaten-up patio furniture and it's clear to all that Maya wants Miles and will let him have her if only he can make the first move. He gets the conversation right, but the tone of it and the attendant body language unbearably wrong. He's giving a languid and detailed explanation, at Maya's prompting, of his one true love: pinot. It's a fragile grape, see, and its full potential is not easily brought to bear; pinot only flourishes under the most exact and clement agricultural conditions and... well, it's not hard to see what Miles is really driving at here. Giamatti even looks, as Wodehouse would say and as would be apropos in a film about wine, like a man poured into his clothes who forgot to say when. Yet despite his best efforts to not let Maya get physically intimate with him, she does just that anyway. He misses his mark, failing to respond after she covers his hand with her own: the international sign for "kiss me, you fool" and a gesture registered on Giamatti's face with as much soulfulness as should be legal without a tenor saxophone in his mouth. (By the way, Maya's speech about why she loves rose, which ends, "...and I guess because it just tastes so fucking good," is the hottest thing a woman has done on screen since Scarlett Johannson sang "Brass in Pocket" in a pink iridescent wig.)

Without giving too much else away, you'll be happy to know that Miles does not come away with an all-better-now, happy egg exterior from his revitalizing affair with Maya, which gets off the ground after the stated bumps and fits. Nor does the free-wheeling and frat-scrupled Jack come away unscathed or irreparably mangled from his romp with not only Stephanie, but a chunky restaurant waitress who's a fan of his long-gone soap opera stardom, as well as, erm, other things...

For all its corkscrew comic staging, Sideways ultimately does what Alexander Payne knows how to do pretty effortlessly by now: break your heart without bleeding the thing dry, and tease and challenge the brow without the beating that thing into submission. His work, like a fine you-know-what, improves remarkably with age.