Away We Go
When I read that Sam Mendes had this dramedy coming out in the heatwave of another Hollywood summer, six months after his heartbreaking domestic drama “Revolutionary Road,” I have to say, my interested was raised almost immediately. Having novelist Dave Eggers’ name on the screenwriting credits didn’t hurt, either- I haven’t read his acclaimed “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” as of yet, but his upcoming work with Spike Jonze on “Where the Wild Things Are” certainly put him on my radar.
Mendes has shown a keen eye for material, from his 1999 Best Picture winner “American Beauty” to “Road to Perdition,” “Jarhead,” and last year’s “Revolutionary Road.” Here, he takes a quirky and novelistic script by Eggers and fellow novelist Vendela Vida and turns it into an engaging and off-color look at finding your way when life gives you some forks in the road.
As Burt and Verona, a 30-something pair (with a baby on the way) who moved to the mid-West to be near Burt’s parents, “The Office’s” John Krasinski and “SNL’s” Maya Rudolph are about as odd a couple as you might expect a filmmaker like Mendes to work with, but it’s a match made in heaven. Krasinski and Rudolph are both capable of laughs that catch in your throat as Burt and Verona- after the news that Burt’s parents (Catherine O’Hara and Jeff Daniels, both dry and dynamic performers) are moving to Belgium a month before the due date- decide to stake out a home of their own before their new arrival. Burt is in insurance, and Verona can do her job from anywhere, so the move is easy, although the couple wonder how they’ve found themselves so unsure of themselves when others seem to have their feet on the ground.
Mendes frames Eggers and Vida’s screenplay like a novel, with one situation unraveling into another while painting a bigger picture- no matter how “on the ball” other people seem, there’s always a crack in their logic (a Mendes specialty in “Beauty” and “Road”). In Arizona, Verona’s old boss (a typically bombastic and brutally funny Allison Janney) and her husband are a good pair, but hardly seem like the type of people you could stand to be around for a long period of time. In Madison, a childhood friend of Burt’s (a flighty and quirky Maggie Ghyllenhaal) lives like a success, but her and her husband’s philosophy on life and child-rearing hardly seems, well, sane. In Montreal, a perfect family unit (with four adopted kids loved by pragmatic parents Chris Messina and Melanie Lynskey) is merely a facade for a pair whose dreams of a family of their own have been thwarted by nature. Only an impromptu trip to Miami, and Burt’s newly-single brother (now with a daughter he has to raise himself), seems to offer some solidity to the couple, in the form of resolve of what they don’t want to do.
“Away We Go” feels longer than its’ 100-minute run time, but it’s an engrossing and original look at life, and how two 30-somethings try to find their way through it. All of the actors bring an individuality and intelligence to their characters- no matter how insensitive and narcissistic- but the film rises and falls with Krasinski and Rudolph. Krasinski brings out the immature goofball of this guy who is more scared than he lets on, but Rudolph is the real star. We see Verona coming apart at the seams as she tries to hide within her emotionally-injured past (her parents died when she was in college), and Rudolph doesn’t miss a beat in a performance for the ages. Same goes for the movie.
