Away We Go

Filmmaker Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road) is not the name you would usually expect to see behind a fun and light road trip comedy. But, as I watched Away We Go, I began to realize that it has much higher aspirations. It's not that it doesn't work as a light comedy. It's quite often very funny and likable. However, I did not expect how much I would care for the characters by the end. This is a wonderful little movie that has moments of truth and sadness within it, and manages to end on a perfect quiet note that took me by surprise. This ranks as one of the best surprises of the summer.

The film stars John Krasinski (TV's The Office) and Maya Rudolph (Saturday Night Live). They have both mainly been known for their TV work, but hopefully this film will give their film careers a boost. They're wonderful here, both individually and as a pair, and bring a lot of honesty and humor to their roles. They play Burt and Verona, an unmarried couple who are expecting their first child in three months. As the film opens, they both know they're not exactly living the right life for starting a family. They are both employed, and Burt has an interview coming up for a better job in Madison, but they're barely making ends meet, and live in a run down cabin with a cardboard window. They had hoped that Burt's parents, Jerry and Gloria (Jeff Daniels and Catherine O'Hara in a hilarious cameo) would help out, but while meeting the parents for dinner, Jerry and Gloria drop the bombshell that they are chasing their dream of living in Bolivia for two years, and are renting out their house, which was supposed to go to Burt and Verona while the parents were away.

Deciding they need to find the perfect place to raise their daughter, Burt and Verona take a cross country journey to try to find a new home. They fly out to different places where friends, colleagues, and relatives live, hoping some place will impress them. They first head off to Arizona, where a former co-worker of Verona's named Lily (Alison Janney) resides in Phoenix, and Verona's younger sister, Grace (Carmen Ejogo), waits for them in Tucson. Burt has a friend named Ellen (a very funny Maggie Gyllenhaal) in Madison, which is near his job interview. Next, they head off to Montreal, where college friends Tom and Munch (Chris Messina and Melanie Lynskey) seemingly lead a perfect family life, only to have personal secrets be revealed. Finally, they try Miami, where Burt's brother (Paul Schneider) is dealing with the fact that his wife has left him, and he will have to raise his young daughter on his own. Each of these segments play out like a short film, but the movie never once feels fragmented. The characters the couple encounter are sometimes broadly drawn in their quirks, but the performances never go so over the top that they don't seem real or feel like they belong in a different movie.

At the center of it all are Burt and Verona, who are obviously smart people, and are written as such. The screenplay by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida treats them with respect, and makes them out to be people I would like to talk to if they actually existed. So many road trip comedies about romantic couples rely on contrived crisis, or threaten to break them up at one point during the course of the journey. This never happens here. It's not that they don't have their personal differences sometimes. Burt, for example, wants to get married, but Verona made a personal vow to her parents (both of whom are dead) that she would never get married unless they were alive to see it. A lesser screenplay would play up this aspect, and probably lead to a scene with a lot of shouting and overacting by the two leads. But here, the characters respect each other too much for that, and discuss the issue in a moving and poignant scene that not only shows the intelligence of the filmmakers, but also the wonderful performances of Krasinski and Rudolph. Although both are comic actors, they don't play their performances up for laughs. The laughs come from the dialogue, and this allows them to both create genuine characters who have deeper dimensions than we initially expect when the movie begins.

Away We Go is a near pitch-perfect film in a lot of ways. It's beautifully shot, it has a wonderful collection of songs that had me on line searching for the CD soundtrack as soon as I got home, and the supporting performances are wonderful. I have read some reviews criticizing the film of having a smug atmosphere, and that the two lead characters were the only smart people, while everyone surrounding them were either idiots or goofballs. I don't feel this is true. Yes, some of the characters come dangerously close to parody (especially Maggie Gyllenhaal as a woman who's been roped into new age parenting, and lives with an aging hippie), but it never goes so far off course that we don't believe these people could not exist. Besides, the characters are not idiots or goofballs to begin with. They are simply set in their ways, and don't realize their behavior might seem odd to others. When Alison Janney's character berates and ridicules her kids while they're within earshot, she doesn't even realize she's doing anything wrong, since her kids pretend to ignore her, although they are obviously listening. This character is tricky to play, as it could easily stop being funny, and start being hateful or hurtful. But Janney finds the right comic tone for the character, as does Gyllenhaal. The climax to her scene, involving Burt having all he can stand, is one of the biggest laughs in the film.

Other characters and scenes are somewhat more subdued, such as Verona's sister Grace. The two sisters share a sweet and honest moment together in a place you would not expect (a bathtub display in a housing and hardware store), and really let us know their deep bond in a short scene that hits a perfect note. As the friends in Montreal, Chris Messina and Melanie Lynskey are both warm, and we can see why Burt and Verona are drawn to them. When their heartbreaking secret is eventually revealed, it is not only a surprisingly powerful scene, but one that is not overplayed. We see the pain behind their happy home life and adopted children, and the performances during the climactic scene at a nightclub hit the right note. We find ourselves caring for the characters, not only for their problems, but for the way that they react and handle them. It's a rare thing to see people in movies acting like real people.

Away We Go is a wonderful movie, and the perfect way to combat the failed spectacle of summer fare like Wolverine or Transformers. It gets us involved first of all with its quiet and warm sense of humor, and then further involves us with its wonderfully developed and acted characters. It's also a movie I have grown to appreciate more since I saw it yesterday, and I have thought back on it. It's rare to see all the qualities it has all in one film. It's even more rare to see all the qualities done so well.

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