Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Smugness
(Away We Go, 7/6/09)
By Nicholas Nicastro
In
theory, there's not much to dislike about Sam Mendes' alternative comedy
Away We Go. In Dave Eggers and wife Vendela Vida, it's got a
screenwriting team that The San Francisco Chronicle has called
"the literary equivalent of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston"
(which, incidentally, leaves us all wondering who the literary equivalent
of Angelina is...). The director is Sam Mendes, who brought us marital
apocalypse not once but twice with Revolutionary Road and American
Beauty. It's got protagonists who look and talk like lifelong Ithacans,
right down to the House of Shalimar couture and the olde-time, boxy
Volvo. So what's to object to?
Let's back up a moment. Eggers and
Vida's script is about Burt (played by The Office's John Krasinski)
and Verona (SNL's Maya Rudolph) as a couple of over-educated,
under-employed thirty-somethings who are expecting their first child.
Realizing they have no connections in their home town, nor any sense
of purpose in their lives, they decide to travel America to find the
ideal place to root their new family. Away We Go is therefore
a road picture with a big dash of the classic "fish out of water"
premise. A heartbreaking work of staggering genius, right?
Well, not quite. As Eggers and Vida
send Burt and Verona coast to coast, mixing them in with friends and
relatives of varying degrees of insanity, there are certainly plenty
of laughs. In Phoenix, we meet a crassly hilarious Allison Jenny as
Verona's former coworker—a big-mouthed, casually offensive cougar
in Talbot's clothing. In Madison, Burt's cousin "LN" (Maggie
Gyllenhaal) maintains her own private temple to fecundity, where negativity
and baby strollers are strictly taboo. From Tucson to Montreal to Miami,
Burt and Verona encounter more crazy and/or broken souls, until their
own yearnings and deficiencies are at last put in healthy context.
On a scene-by-scene level, as the
film concentrates on small observations and small rewards, it's a pleasant
journey. But cumulatively, Away We Go seems just a bit too impressed
with its own cleverness. Krasinski with his fuzzy chops and a very preggers
Rudolph are almost Muppet-cute in their faux naïf cluenessness—they
might as well be Burt n' Ernie instead of Burt and Verona. Their dialog
is similarly cute and clever, but as in the similarly smug Juno,
I didn't buy it as real human interaction for a minute. Yes, Eggers
and Vida have a point when they suggest that it's not the perfect home
you find when you travel, but the perspective to accept wherever you
are. It's just that it might be nice for them to offer us an alternative
other than freaks or Muppets.
In the end, Away We Go is
like a term paper done at the last minute by the kid who knows he's
the smartest in the class: it's better than most, but not as good as
it thinks.
©2009 Nicholas Nicastro
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