Susan Granger’s review of “Away We Go” (Focus Features)
Perhaps as atonement for the suicidal marital misery of “Revolutionary Road,” director Sam Mendes offers this dramedy about an affectionate, unmarried, utterly devoted, thirty-something couple in rural Colorado who are expecting a baby.
Now that they’re raising a family, Burt (John Krasinski of TV’s “The Office”) and Verona (Maya Rudolph of TV’s “Saturday Night Live”) are anxiously looking for a suitable place to settle down. Burt’s in insurance and Verona’s a medical illustrator, meaning that they can live anywhere. So they decide to take an exploratory road trip and visit various friends and relatives, earnestly gathering unconventional nuggets of bittersweet knowledge in their search for emotional truth.
Their respective parents aren’t much help. Verona’s are dead and Burt’s (Catherine O’Hara, Jeff Daniels) are moving to Belgium. In Phoenix, there’s Lily (Allison Janney), Verona former boss who turns out to be a brittle, obnoxious drunk with fat, surly kids. In Tuscon, there’s Verona’s sister (Carmen Ejogo) with a loser boyfriend. In Madison, Wisconsin, Burt’s childhood “cousin,” LN (Maggie Gyllenhaal) turns out to be a smug, soft-spoken Women’s Studies professor who’s into New Age thinking, engendering amusement with a comment about sex roles in “the seahorse community.” Things take even more of a turn for the worse with married college friends (Melanie Lynsky, Chris Messina) in Montreal and Burt’s distraught brother (Paul Schneider) in Miami.
Screenwriter Dave Eggers and his novelist wife, Vendela Vida Eggers, interweave free-wheeling, episodic plotlines about losing parental figures with banal observations about love and sacrifice. And British-born director Sam Mendes, whose previous forays into the psychological confines of suburbia, including “American Beauty,” condescendingly passes off caricature as character, leaving only genial, unassuming John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph balancing on the normalcy scale with omnipresent singer/songwriter Alexi Murdoch’s poignant melodies on the soundtrack. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Away We Go” is a slow-moving, shallow, satirical 6. It’s all about the ambling, aimless journey, not the destination.
