2. Alexander Payne Loves Miserable Men In Cars
With the exception of his first and second features Citizen Ruth and Election, Alexander Payne deals almost exclusively in road trip movies starring curmudgeonly middle-aged (Sideways, The Descendants) or old (About Schmidt, Nebraska) men. He regularly features a unironic voiceover from his lead characters, detailing the problems with their lives and how they could be fixed if everyone else just gave them a break without realising quite how complicit they are in their own suburban tragedies. Usually the tired anti-heroes learn something about themselves, usually with the assistance of a simpler or more hopeful companion, but it's a coin toss as to whether they'll actually use that information to make their life any better. Paul Giamatti and George Clooney in Sideways and The Descendants respectively are two of the more hopeful if ambiguous cases, whereas it's anybody's guess whether or not Bruce Dern (Nebraska) or Matthew Broderick (Election) will ever let themselves get another shot at happiness. The absurd mundanity of everyday life is never more precisely illustrated than in Payne's movies, where comedy and no small amount of pity can be gleaned from the strange mechanism of a self-buckling seatbelt in a car with absolutely nothing else going for it, as in Election, or the heartbreaking fact of Paul Giamatti's terminally lonely wine connoisseur drinking his best bottle at its prime out of a cardboard cup in a fast food restaurant. Payne's always been the chronicler of jokes that are hysterical until you realise how depressing they truly are.