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Current picture shows: Sam Mendes' Away We Go
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In the years after Will Ferrell left Saturday Night Live to transform himself into Ron Burgundy, Ricky Bobby and Jackie Moon, when the show slipped further and further into unfunny drivel, one of its few bright spots was the chameleon-like Maya Rudolph. Of multiracial ethnicity, she could play black, white, Asian, and Latina characters with equal aplomb, including her recurring spoof of the deep voiced and vacuous Italian fashion designer Donatella Versace.
Rudolph did sporadic feature film work while appearing on the show, and one could tell it was only a matter of time before she joined her fellow SNL alums and made the jump to the big screen for good. She had a decent-sized turn in Robert Altman’s swan song, A Prairie Home Companion, but Away We Go marks her first meaty role, equal parts comedy and drama and impressive on both fronts..jpg)
Away We Go, directed by Sam Mendes from a screenplay by the husband/wife team of Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, stars Rudolph and a scruffy John Krasinski (best known as Jim Halpert on The Office) as Verona and Burt, an unmarried couple expecting their first child. He wants to get married, she doesn’t. They live in a beat-up home out in the boondocks to be close to his parents (Catherine O’Hara and Jeff Daniels, who always seems to be playing someone’s dad these days), but when his folks suddenly announce they’re moving to Belgium just three months before the baby is due, they take stock of their situation and decide a prolonged road trip is the only logical course of action.
The purpose of their trip is to find a suitable place to make their nest, visiting an odd assortment of friends and relatives in the process. There’s a dysfunctional couple composed of a manically chatty and alcoholic wife (the hard-working Allison Janney) and her non-descript, sullen husband, played by Jim Gaffigan (AKA Michael Ian Black’s plump sidekick from the Sierra Mist commercials). There’s another couple with a slew of adopted children of various races who have had five miscarriages, one within the past week. They visit Burt’s brother (Paul Schneider), a sad sack of a man whose wife has just left him in the lurch, abandoning their young daughter. Maggie Gyllenhaal, as she is wont to do, steals the movie as a nightmarish New Age mother first seen at her office breastfeeding two kids at the same time, one of whom looks about two years too old for it. She and her husband (Josh Hamilton), who claims to suffer from an Electra (not Oedipus) complex, share a communal bed with their kids (even when making love), and have a mortal aversion to strollers, believing they signify pushing your children away from you. These aren’t so much real people as various types, each one embodying a quality that Verona and Burt don’t want to be.
The movie, in its rush to get from location to location, only has time to create broad caricatures, but what saves it time and again from complete vapidity is the quirky chemistry between Rudolph and Krasinski. There’s a naturalness to their relationship that makes you believe they are truly laughing at each other’s jokes, which is not as easy as it sounds. In the film’s funniest scene, a fed up Krasinski storms away from Gyllenhaal and Hamilton’s dinner table, but not before giving their oldest son a madcap ride in the forbidden stroller. Mendes cuts to a shot of Rudolph, who can’t help but burst out laughing from the scene’s ridiculousness, a moment of rare freshness and spontaneity in an otherwise stiffly directed piece.
More than any director working today, the British-born Mendes is obsessed with all things American and what it means to live and dream in America. The appropriately titled American Beauty was his first stab at unmasking the malaise lurking behind well-kempt suburban homes, but in the end it was too calculated and contrived to offer anything but strained seriousness. His recent Revolutionary Road was so earnest in its attempt to recreate the exact look and feel of 1950s America that it missed the essential modernism of Richard Yates’ novel. His best film remains Road to Perdition, but it recreated an America that existed only in comic books and Dick Tracy serials and was aided immeasurably by Conrad L. Hall’s brilliant cinematography.
In Away We Go, Rudolph and Krasinski travel to Phoenix, Tucson, Madison, Montreal, and Miami, but they could have just as easily gone to San Diego, Omaha, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. Unlike, say, the great German director Wim Wenders, whose Alice in the Cities and Paris, Texas, used the American landscape to highlight and define their characters’ existences, Mendes’ film could have been set anywhere, so little regard is paid to the cultural details that make a city’s people unique.
“Are we f@ck-ups?” Verona asks Burt, in a moment of quiet reflection, and the problem with the movie is that they’re not. They’re the film’s most sane people and they change very little during the course of the story. All that is separating them from being good or bad parents, the film seems to suggest, is their location – a bleak concept for all those toiling away in urban slums or trailer parks around the country.
Away We Go is currently playing at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier.
The trailer for Away We Go:
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