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Away We Go Review
Away We Go is one of the wittier and more poignant films I've seen this year.
Written by novelists Dave Eggers and his partner Vandela Vida, it’s a road movie without a road – a series of pit-stops scattered around North America as Burt (John Krasinski) and the increasingly pregnant Verona (Maya Rudolph) drop in on assorted friends with a view to finding the perfect place to bring up a family.
See, the advantage of having nothing is that they could live anywhere – especially now that his parents have informed they’re moving to Belgium and won’t be available for babysitting duty.
They could move to Arizona where Verona’s sister lives. Burt has a job prospect in Wisconsin. Or they have college friends in Montreal. Their destiny awaits them, all they have to do is go out and find it. And away they go…
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It’s never explained how these financial stragglers can afford such speculative wandering, and when they do find their dream home it’s mystifying that it hasn’t occurred to them before. Still, the movie’s loose-limbed, spontaneous quality is a good part of its appeal, and a refreshing change of pace from a filmmaker whose artfully designed compositions often seem self-conscious and painfully detached.
In keeping with Indie-wood’s vogue for shuffling snippy satire and sentimentality (see Juno and Little Miss Sunshine) Away We Go presents its trepidatious travellers with half a dozen starkly contrasted parental figures, including Allison Janney’s monstrously vulgar alcoholic, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s radical earth-mother (who has shortened her name to “LN”), and Paul Schneider as Burt’s rawly-dumped brother, who wonders aloud if it would be wrong to tell his daughter her mom has been murdered…
There’s a level of bile here that some may find alienating – I bet it went down like a lead balloon in Tucson – but neglectful and overweening parents seem like fair game to me, and boy do the actors go for it! Each and every vignette is so sharp you could cut yourself.
Away We Go: John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph, Maggie Gyllenhaal
Then again, Burt and Verona remain on the fuzzy side. Burt is a boy still trying on manhood for size (with a beard for extra emphasis), and though we’ve seen Krasinski do this before, he seems to have fine-tuned the performance to the point where he could very happily play it for the next two decades. Unlike his character, he’s an actor who has found himself.
Save for her role in Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion Maya Rudolph hasn’t made much impact in movies before, though she has a following in the US after 8 seasons on Saturday Night Live (her most famous character was a caricature of Donatella Versace). With her frazzled, freckled face she’s hardly the glamour girl who would normally be shoehorned into the romantic lead, but she seizes her chance and runs with it. She’s the heart and soul of the movie.
Sam Mendes brings out a more thoughtful and nuanced presence than the brittle comedienne, and Rudolph makes you consider how rarely we see a real woman at the centre of things. Even her occasional tentativeness works for the part. Verona is so fresh and alert, she can’t help but doubt herself as they trail from one family disaster to the next and wonder what kind of parents they are going to make.
Inevitably this is an episodic and uneven movie, not immune to cheap shots and dramatic shortcuts, but Verona’s emotional journey gives it a powerful through line. It does catch an anxiety that will be acutely familiar to anyone contemplating imminent parenthood, and – in a beautifully judged cameo by Melanie Lynskey – the deep anguish of someone who has had that prospect snatched away.
More often than not, and where it really counts, Away We Go hits home.
Away We Go Reviews
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