Six months into the pregnancy, Burt and Verona have dinner at Burt's parents' house. The two live near Burt's parents as an apparent favor - the expenses they incur on their road trip (rental cars, gifts for friends, plane tickets) imply that Burt is doing just fine at his stay-at-home job - but they aren't exactly appreciative. After an awkward conversation about the baby (Burt's mom wants to know how black it'll be), Jerry (Jeff Daniels) and Gloria (Catherine O'Hera) drop their big news: They'll be moving to Antwerp, before the baby is born.
While that isn't a problem for Burt's parents, who are quick to remind the couple that they've been planning their trip for 15 years, it's certainly a problem for Burt and Verona: What are they going to do?
The short answer is that they won't live in their dilapidated shack, full of the sort of nick-nacks that belong to people who can do everything but can't decide to do just one. The long answer is the film, which is a trip across America, taken by plane, train, and automobile, with a stop in Montreal, which is an under-appreciated city.
Along the way, Burt and Verona meet up with relatives and old friends, normal people and eccentrics. They hope to learn from these people the kind of life they want to provide for their child. For the most part, they are unsuccessful, which is kind of the point.
The movie, a series of vignettes that smash-cut to title cards for the next city they plan on visiting, are either funny, sad, or a bit of both. In Phoenix, they meet with Lilly (Allison Janney), who was Verona's boss in Chicago, a city to which the couple will definitely not be returning. Lilly is an absolutely brutal drunk - it's the early afternoon, and she is hammered. She says awful things about her breasts, her 12-year-old daughter's weight and future sexuality, and her willingness to leave her husband (Jim Gaffigan). What she says is funny and sad. Her family is shellshocked, barely there. Burt and Verona are shocked and don't want to be there.
Their trip takes them from Phoenix to Tuscon to Madison to Montreal to Miami - there are no examples of the absolutely perfect family Burt and Verona wish to emulate. This is familiar ground for director Sam Mendes, whose Revolutionary Road was a powerful movie about the tension between two people who, on the surface, have a perfect relationship. By contrast, Away We Go is a much lighter movie, but it still carries a lot of weight. How many of us have inconsiderate family members, insufferable drunks, and whacked out losers in our lives? The friends with the near-perfect relationship? The sibling in need?
Burt and Verona are passive to a certain point, and they are truly, sincerely nice people - the kind of people your parents want you to be friends with. Maybe it seems strange that the movie's perfect couple is off looking for another couple to emulate, not realizing that most of the people they visit with envy them for being every bit the couple they aren't, even without tying the knot. If anything, it proves that Burt and Verona aren't rude and condescending people at all. If they were, why bother with living by Burt's parents in the first place?
In a lot of ways, this movie could have fallen flat on its face. The end of the film is predictable, even if the situations Burt and Verona observe are murky and uncertain. I felt that there was a need for that though - the protagonists are deserving of nice things; a bleak outlook would have been unnecessarily overwrought and without explanation.
It's the acting that propels just about everything. Krasinski shows that he has chops beyond staring into a camera, at Jenna Fischer, or reacting to what's going on around him in the Office. I'd much prefer to see him in movies than Rainn Wilson. The real surprise of the movie is Rudolph, who was always teetering on the brink of being a main player on Saturday Night Live, but just never seemed to take off. Her character is the emotional center of the movie, the mother who doesn't want to screw everything up, the girl whose parents died early in her life, the thirtysomething who wants to grow up.
The supporting cast is also stellar, but special credit goes to Maggie Gyllenhaal, playing a childhood friend of Burt's who grew up, changed her name to LN, and wound up indoctrinated in late-1960's hippie psychobabble. She hates strollers because they involve a constant pushing away of children, for example. The character is entirely weird, and I have a hard time believing that a university would employ such a woman (at least one co-worker seems to hate her), but Gyllenhall effectively skewers academia - its eccentricities and its potential ugliness. She has the best line in the movie, about why there are so many seahorses in her home.
Some smugness might creep in at the edges, but I didn't find fault with the characters. As a quirky road trip movie, Away We Go is aiming for Little Miss Sunshine, right down to the uplifting music playing in the background as the couple's boxy, awful little car drives out into the distance. The music doesn't change when the car does. It is all Alexi Murdoch on the soundtrack, doing his best to emulate Nick Drake, who kept taking me out of the picture. Little Miss Sunshine had its fair share of indie-folk darlings doing songs, but they really were in the background, lyrics cut for the theatrical flare of the music. Away We Go also felt much less organic than the standard bearer for this kind of movie. There are times when Burt and Verona seem like aliens being exposed to various facets of the human experience for the first time, likely because the script necessitates that the two be pure and naïve so they can run through a gamut of depressing, awkward American home-life scenarios. Maybe it works better with one scenario, one family, one destination, with all the character quirks and life situations in-between. Maybe Mendes, a Brit, doesn't understand the American myth of the open road. Maybe that myth is dying. I don't know, but it's still a game try.
I also don't know if I could call this a comedy - there are laughs to be had, but I have a feeling that they aren't the point. Mendes, working from a script by the talented husband/wife team of Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, delivers a somewhat hip slice-of-life/road trip film that examines the secrets lying just beneath the surface of most relationships. It is skeptical, but there's hope. Burt and Verona don't keep secrets. They seem to be doing fine.
Far Fucking Out
4 comments:
Don't get me wrong, I think this was well-written, but were if not for the specific Dude picture, I might not know what you thought of this movie. You didn't seem to praise or bash it at all. I guess that kind of coincides with the final rating, but I was left a tad confused. Either way, you ended up in about the same place as me. It's good, not great.
You're right. Just checked the work computer for a copy of the rough draft, and I left out paragraphs of stuff. Re-added it. Now I just hope I don't spoil the movie too much.
"It is all Alexi Murdoch on the soundtrack, doing his best to emulate Nick Drake, who kept taking me out of the picture."
Amen. It didn't take me out of the picture too much or all that often, but it definitely happened, and I definitely kept doing double-takes in my head thinking it was Drake at times.
But don't you dare come close to saying a negative word about LMS' soundtrack. I ♥ DeVotchKa and love that soundtrack. ;)
I'd never say anything negative about LMS's soundtrack. Notice that they took some DeVotchKa songs (and Sufjan Stevens' glorious "Chicago") and whittled it down to the instrumental elements that most benifited what was going on at the time. That was brilliant.
I did the Drake double-take maybe four or five times, during scenes where I was clearly meant to contemplate what had just gone on. So I'd say it kept taking me out of the movie.
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