Review of Away We Go (2009) by David J — 22 Jul 2010

Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road), known for brooding dramas dealing with suburban angst takes a break to do something more light-hearted, sort of.

Verona (Maya Rudolph) and her boyfriend Burt (John Krasinksi) are expecting a child. They live in a trailer and don't make very much money. They begin contemplating the status of their lives, and wonder things like "are we fuck ups?" In order to find the best environment to raise their child, they decide to take a trip to visit their friends living across the USA, and one stop to Canada, in hopes of finding a suitable environment that feels right.

This is a wandering kind of movie, divided into a series of segments where the two protagonists go "away to Phoenix...Tuscan...Montreal" etc. encountering a series of quirky characters and misadventures, each new city a window into the seemingly happy lives of others. It is the characters they meet up with final two "away to" segments that redeem the movie. The first two encounters are filled with aggravating characters that no one who isn't forced to endure the company of, would run. They are shallow and unintelligent. There are grabs for laughs at the expense of their stupidity, but these are the kinds of people who are aggravatingly stupid, not laughably stupid. A friend of Verona in Phoenix emasculates her husband and is intend to tease her prepubescent children until they have no self-esteem. This is also where the movie strives for some cheap laughs, like Burt falling down while on the phone trying to impress a business client.

A common theme among Mendes movies is domestic unrest. Characters who seem to have it all, living in suburbia, quietly suffer extraordinary discontent. The movie attempts to capture that theme in all its characters even the aggravating ones, but it is only in the final two encounter segments that it is done successfully. They have problems that are heartbreaking, and there could have been a successful movie made about just them. However I always suspect that these kinds of movies that rely on characters entering and exiting are a product of screenwriters who don't know how to develop their characters enough for a feature.

When they finally do find their perfect home the experience isn't nearly as rewarding for the audience as it is for the characters. On a related note, one of the things that bothers me about movies, particularly Hollywood movies, is when a character or characters live in the kind of dream house that they couldn't possible acquire, even if it is a fixer-upper.