Sometimes a movie gets it completely wrong. Away We Go strives hard to be something more than it actually is, but winds up tripping over it's own shoelaces. I take issue with a film that's quirky just for the sake of being quirky. I'm all for characters who maybe aren't always on the most even keel, but sometimes indie films make the mistake of thinking that quirk is a substitute for personality.
John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph play Burt and Verona, a couple expecting their first child. They don't really seem to have their crap together, living in a shell of a house with little to no electricity or furniture to speak of. They look hella poor, frankly, which strikes me as odd since his parents(Catherine O'Hara and Jeff Daniels) live right up the street and seem pretty well off. Ofcourse they're neurotic, and pretty damn self-involved since they decide to move away right before their grandkid is born, leaving the two parents to fend for themselves. Now, rather than getting their crap together the two decide to go on a road trip of sorts, ostensibly to find a new place to call home.
My beef with that is that these two aren't really looking for a place to call home. They are looking for people to show them how to raise their own kid. At no point do they actually look at houses or experience the towns they visit. They basically sit and observe their friends, most of whom should probably have their kids taken away from then. Each trip is broken up into chapters titled "Away to Phoenix" or "Away to Wherever". The first involves them meeting up with Verona's old boss Lily and her husband, played by Allison Janney and Jim Gaffigan. They're one of those miserable couples who seem to be getting by through sheer momentum. They have no particular love for eachother, and no particular concern for their kids. Lily in particular is snarky and sarcastic, and downright insulting to her children. She's supposed to be funny. I think. But she just comes off as ugly and bitchy. Next up is the disastrous sequence with Maggie Gyllenhall and Josh Hamilton as a pair of hippies so annoying and wildly sterotyped that it's like they fell out of a bad sitcom. F'real, they have a thing against strollers. Everybody's a conformist! Ooooohhhhh!!!! They don't work because that means giving in to "the man!" Ooooohhh! It's friggin' awful, but the worst thing about it is that it's long as hell! It goes on forever!
The next couple, I admit, could've been interesting. Their friends in Ottawa, Tom and Munch(Melanie Lynskey, one of my faves) adopted a bunch of kids when it became clear that she was never going to be able to have them on her own. They appear to be a rock solid couple, with genuine love for both eachother and their children, despite all of their problems with conceiving. From this chapter on the film attempts belatedly to add some emotional heft. The problem is this film hasn't earned any of it. It's been one long exercise is meaninglessness up to this point, with the occasional joke tossed in. At no point are we really privy to Burt and Verona as actual people. They're just there to serve as a device for us to meet these quirky, crazy people. So when we get to the point where we're actually supposed to care about what happens, it's pretty damn hard to invest in any of it.
I'm not sure how I feel about Sam Mendes. He seems to have some sort of beef with Americans, or atleast the American family if you want to analyze his previous films(yes, even Jarhead was about a close knit family of soldiers who desperately wanted to kill something). I can see it, but that's not what bothers me. What bothers me is that his films have gotten less enjoyable. Period. I loved American Beauty and Road to Perdition, but was sorta blah about Jarhead and now this is borderline terrible. There's no chemistry between Rudolph and Krasinski. It's like they're spouting lines at a blank wall or something. I'm sure somewhere buried underneath that Unibomber beard Krasinski is inexplicably sporting there lies some sense of a personality. A sheepish grin does not a character make.
4/10
