REVIEW Away We Go

By Philip Martin

LITTLE ROCK — Sam Mendes' Away We Go is a movie about deciding how to live in a world where you can defer adulthood almost indefinitely. It is about being lost and afraid, and the sobering realization that there is no authority to consult and all advice is suspect.

Movie

Away We Go

79

Rating: R

Length: 1 hour, 38 minutes

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It's also a shambling and seemingly purposefully unfocused affair, and the seeking couple at its off-center as often seem smug hipsters as vehicles for the audience's empathy. We're supposed to like them because they're cute misfits in love, but this is sometimes difficult given how oblivious they seem to their privileged status.

Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) are a blissfully unmarried couple living in fashionable semi-squalor (they drive an old Volvo and live in a ramshackle but comfortable house). They are expecting their first child and are fortunate to have jobs that allow them almost absolute freedom of movement.Burt sells insurance futures over the telephone, while whatever Verona does, she's able to do from home.

They've elected to live close to Burt's parents, but Burt's parents (Jeff Daniels and Catherine O'Hara) have better things to do than baby-sit. They're moving to Antwerp ("The City of Lights!" Daniels enthuses), a month before the baby is due.

While this dismays Burt and Verona, it also sets them free, as they apparently have the resources to live anywhere they want. So they embark on a Kerouacian road trip to discover (North) America, reconnect with scattered familyand old friends, and ultimately find the best place to raise their sacred baby.

But Away We Go isn't a gentle road movie amiably spoofing the strange ways of American families, but something darker, a nightmare journey into the twisted soul of American banality. Or something like that.

They encounter a social-climbing child-abusing alcoholic (Allison Janney) married to an apocalyptic moper (Jim Gaffigan) in Phoenix; silly post-hippies (Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton) with a family bed in Madison, Wis., and in Miami a shattered father (Paul Schneider) trying to find a way to tell his daughter that her mother has left them.

They also encounter a happy, blended family - in Montreal - but even that sprawling, laughing brood has a dark, unhappy secret.

While I don't agree with those who claim that Mendes hates America, and I think Revolutionary Road and American Beauty were especially fine films that had much to say about the middle American desperation, Away We Go feels like an insult.

Why this is isn't all that easy to say, and plenty of people will accept the film as a minor indiestyled quirkfest. But we expect sharper writing from the married novelists (Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida) who supplied the screenplay. Not only does it lean hard and heavy on stereotypically dysfunctional families, we can guess that they didn't intend the film as an indictment of traditional marriage.

Away We Go is one of those movies, like Alexander Payne's About Schmidt, that takes the boorishness of conventional Americans as a given and valorizes nonconformity for its own sake. While it contains moments of genuine sweetness and human comedy, the overall effect is of an attack upon those of us who work for a living and haven't the means to indulge our romantic imagination.

MovieStyle, Pages 39 on 06/26/2009