RSS
Home
Triumphant return for Mendes with 'Away We Go'
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
<3
John Krasinski has the power to turn people into 12-year-old girls. He's so charming on screen, and one of comedy's best straight men that every time I see him I want to run out and buy a spiral notebook just so I can write his name with hearts around it. Of course, as a film critic I should be enchanted with Sam Mendes who has yet to direct a film I didn't enjoy. His record holds up as he partner with Krasinski with Away We Go.
Listing the cast one might assume that this was either a raunchy comedy or just another chick flick. Names like Karsinski, Maya Rudolph, Jim Gaffigan, Jeff Daniels most likely lead you to thoughts of bad SNL sketches or low brow humor. Away We Go couldn't be farther from either. The film is the story of Burt (Krasinski <3)and Verona (Rudolph), a couple madly in love who become pregnant and suddenly realize they don't really have a home or an identity. So they set out to find both, traveling across the country visiting their friends and family and discovering that parenting, love and family are wonderful and dreadful all at the same time.
The is a testament to what comes when you have an intelligent and charming script, a talented director and a cast full of surprises. The first and most obvious surprise is Rudolph who delivers a performance that is both deep, funny and true, and rivals some of the best female leads I've seen in years. Her and Krasinski deftly bounce from drama to comedy and back again. This is all while working in one of the most wickedly clever and well paced (except maybe in the beginning) screenplays of the year so far. There is a scene near the end of the film when the two are laying on a trampoline that sums up the film's entire character through its feeling and humor, and is so perfectly captured by Mendes that you start to wish the man would rewind time and shoot every romantic scene in every movie.
Don't worry about all this talk about "emotion" and "feeling" though, a large part of the film's charm is the whacky and hilarious friends and family the two run into all of whom are brilliant encapsulations of family life in the good ol' United States of America. Gaffigan and Allison Janney are flat out hilarious as the loud mouthed Midwesterner family, but the real beauty of the film is that all these families that seem so over the top really and truly exist.
I've now used some form of the word "true" twice in this review, which was unintentional, but now that I realize it I also realize in the five years I have been doing this I don't think I've ever really called a movie that, but that is what Away We Go is.It's simply true. It's a slice of American life just like Mendes delivered in American Beauty, Revolutionary Road and, to a lesser extent, the heavily underrated Road to Perdition -- except now he's done it with a bunch of comedians and a bit less depression.
Related Articles:
Comments
