Away We Go

Sam Mendes’ most light-hearted film to date, Away We Go follows young married couple Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) as they embark on a cross-country journey hoping to find an ideal place to raise their unborn child – with their trip eventually bringing them face-to-face with a whole host of oppressively quirky figures (including Maggie Gyllenhaal’s LN and Allison Janney’s Lily). There’s little doubt that the idea behind Away We Go is ultimately more appealing than the final product, as screenwriters Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida blanket the proceedings with a number of aggressively idiosyncratic elements that often threaten to negate the film’s positive attributes (eg Krasinski and Rudolph’s undeniably marvelous work). It’s consequently not surprising to note that the movie is generally only engaging in fits and starts, with the particularly ineffective opening hour rarely living up to the promise of the down-to-earth premise (eg Burt and Verona’s encounter with Gyllenhaal’s broadly-portrayed hippie character is funny, certainly, but the scene, which plays like a rejected Saturday Night Live sketch, feels as though it’d be more at home within an entirely different film). The egregiously off-the-wall atmosphere persists a great deal longer than one might’ve hoped, admittedly, yet there does reach a point at which Eggers and Vida slowly but surely begin to emphasize moments of genuineness – with a third-act sequence detailing Burt and Verona’s various promises to one another standing as an obvious highlight. It goes without saying that had the remainder of the proceedings been infused with similarly affecting interludes, Away We Go would’ve undoubtedly come off as one of those movies that essentially speaks to an entire generation (ie sort of a Garden State for the thirty-something crowd) – with the ultimate realization of this fact transforming the film into a far more pronounced disappointment than one might’ve initially suspected.

*** out of ****