In an earlier post I mentioned that my desire to see the new Sam Mendes film Away We Go - sparked by the involvement of Dave Eggers, a strong cast that includes Maggie Gyllenhaal and Allison Janney, and mentions of Hal Ashby as one of the movie's inspirations - would no doubt lead to disappointment once I actually got around to watching it since movies almost never turn out the way they should on paper or the way that trailers make them look. So it is with great pleasure that I report that Away We Go almost entirely fulfills my expectations; it's probably too much to hope for that it will spark a return to freewheeling '70s style cinema.
The predominant critical reaction to Away We Go has been a kind of reverse snobbery, a disdain of the film for being almost too hip and pleased with itself. A.O. Scott of the Times ended his take with the sentence "This movie does not like you," a sentiment both puzzling for its assignment of motives to the results of a collaborative art form and for its almost complete misapprehension of the film's concerns. Away We Go, from a script by Dave Eggers and his wife Vendela Vida, is a movie of extremes. The first half broadly satirizes liberal humanism, as Bert (John Krasinski) and his pregnant girlfriend Verona (Maya Rudolph, whose performance makes virtue interesting) travel around the country in search of the best place to raise their soon-to-be-born daughter. Bert's Native American-obsessed parents (Jeff Daniels and Catherine O'Hara) have thrown the couple's plans into confusion with the announcement of an impending movie to Belgium; Bert and Verona resolve to look for a new place to raise their child.
Away We Go begins with broad comedy and gradually narrows its focus to more specific and harrowing concerns. The first stop is Phoenix, where a former colleague (Allison Janney) of Verona's drinks constantly and blurts out inappropriate information in her children's hearing while her husband (Jim Gaffigan) can barely conceal his unhappiness. Next is Madison; Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton are liberal academics so indignantly self-righteous that Hamilton's dad puts "making a living" on a list of things his son will never have to do. Bert and Verona are rightly horrified by both Janney's and Gyllenhaal's characters; yet Scott would have us believe there's something smug and ugly about being upset at the idea of not teaching one's child the value of work. Attitudes towards work are constantly at issue in Away We Go; Bert has an incomprehensible insurance job that requires to put on a fake-cheery phone voice. When the couple visit Bert's parents early in the film Bert's father can be heard doing the same routine on the phone in the next room, so Bert comes by it honestly. The real Bert isn't secretly writing a novel or harboring dreams of an organic food empire (from the snide tone of several reviews I expected Bert and Verona to constantly be nattering on about blogs or Tibet). The "real" Bert carries a kind of unfocused, generalized irony through the first half of the film. This includes the scene in which Bert tells Verona he wants their child to have a "Huck Finn-y" childhood; A.O. Scott uses this moment as evidence of Bert's contempt for American society, but the line is clearly meant as a joke.
It's when When Bert and Verona reach Montreal that Away We Go shows its hand. The school friends (Chris Messina and Melanie Lynskey) who take Bert and Verona out for a night on the town are raising a multicultural brood of happy adopted children. At a "karaoke dance" club Messina's Tom tells Bert of his wife's multiple miscarriages and his frustration at not knowing what to do for her in a monologue occurring while Lynskey performs a mock pole dance to the Velvet Underground's "Oh! Sweet Nuthin'." If these two are the "cretins and idiots" Scott describes I must have dozed off for a moment and missed the scene where Tom yells at his children. The dry detachment with which Bert and Verona view the outsized encounters of Away We Go's first half falls away after the Montreal episode. Both fear that the next phase of their life will drive them apart and ultimately damage their child. Given the fact that neither has any support system to speak of (Verona's parents are dead), that's not an unreasonable fear. I won't spoil the ending, but with regard to the "hermetic paradise" (Scott's phrase) Bert and Verona find: They do not decide to live in a biosphere. They will live, work, and parent in a place that affords them peace and safety; there's no indication they plan to or want to stop interacting with other humans. (Aren't they statistically a good bet to change careers 1-2 more times?) I don't think it's possible for a movie to "not like you," but the more troubling question is why does the New York Times have a movie critic who doesn't like characters?
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