Away We Go (2009)
Grade:A
Away We Go – for me – is much like last year’s My Blueberry Nights in that it’s a film that seemed to be like a puzzle piece custom-made for everything to which I would love and respond. Its humor is in line with what I naturally find funny, the cast is full of actors that I love, and the film’s tale of a thirtysomething couple unexpectedly forced to grow up particularly resonated with me as a reflection of a period in my life that I will soon face.
What this amounts to is a review that is going to be glowingly ecstatic, but that you should take with a grain of salt (whatever that phrase even means). Though Away We Go is, I think, a more objectively “good” movie than My Blueberry Nights, it is similarly placed in my figurative Excel spreadsheet of films I’ve seen in a column of films that I find personally resonant. For me, this film is a masterpiece, but if you disagree, I won’t hold it against you.
Director Sam Mendes (American Beauty) hammered out this film while last year’s Revolutionary Road was in the editing room, and what’s such a breath of fresh air with his latest is the ease with which the film seems to unfold. I count American Beauty among my very favorite films of all time, but what that film and especially Road highlight is Mendes’s tendency towards a highly structured film frame. Every shot is so perfectly constructed that it’s almost distracting how good Mendes is at crafting a film.
With Away We Go, Mendes takes the independent spirit of the script (from husband-wife novelists Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, tackling their first screenplay here) and infuses his sometimes stuffy aesthetic with a great sense of freedom. Yes, there are the occasional overly-arranged shots, but the cinematography has such an ease and flow to it that Mendes has nearly reinvented himself here. Who’d’ve thought he had this film in him to make?
John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph star as Burt and Verona, thirtysomethings who live in a small rundown house in Colorado to be near Burt’s parents. Six months pregnant, they visit Burt’s parents (Catherine O’Hara and Jeff Daniels) for dinner only to be informed that they’re moving to Belgium for two years. Left with no ties to Colorado, Burt and Verona set out to visit various friends and try to discover where they should settle down and become legitimate functioning adults.
As they travel across the country, the film provides a string of perfect or near-perfect vignettes with various friends and family members. In one of the better chunks, Verona and her sister Grace (Carmen Ejogo) share a lovely moment as Grace shops for a jacuzzi tub and reflect on their parents’ deaths. Allison Janney and Jim Gaffigan show up as erratic family friends of Verona, Janney milking her role for every possible laugh. Chris Messina and Melanie Lynskey are Burt and Verona’s college friends who find an empty happiness in their adopted brood and inability to conceive on their own. Maggie Gyllenhaal plays Burt’s childhood friend LN, the absolute worst kind of ultra-liberal hippie mother, and Paul Schneider is Courtney, Burt’s brother in the midst of a family crisis.
What these vignettes all do is combine to create a portrait of various parents, some who think they have the answers and some who don’t, but who are all simply doing the best they can. Some of them are failing, some of them are successful, but what the truly lovely coda of the film points to in the whole of the film is the idea that home is where you make it. That there are no right answers. That everyone has their issues. That everyone is a fuck up, even the ones who don’t seem to be fuck ups. And in that simple realization, we all cease to be fuck ups.
Perhaps a blog post will be dedicated in the future to detailing in specifics how I think the film could’ve been improved structurally, but to deal with that in abstract here: the nature of the story dictates an episodic feeling, something that couldn’t have been avoided, but it’s the only noticeable weakness. All of the visits to various cities have such a resounding sense of beginning and ending that it feels sometimes like a film equivalent of a short story collection.
But what marvelous short stories they are. At the end of each scene, I kept thinking to myself “the film could end here and it would be perfect” and “that was a perfect segment all on its own.” There are damn few films that earn that kind of praise and even fewer that sustain that praise to the very end of the run time. Away We Go is one of those rare films that melds all of its disparate elements together into a whole that blossoms exponentially. The cast is uniformly excellent (who knew Maya Rudolph, she of the killer Whitney Houston impression on Saturday Night Live, had this sort of subtle dramatic work in her?), the direction in service of the story, the writing top-notch, the music well-chosen. It all works together to form what is without a doubt the best film of the year so far, one I can see revisiting for years to come.
Read about Away We Go at my Year in Review: 2009 article.
Read about Away We Go at my 25 Films I Really Liked From The Aughts article.
Bottom Line:
The film may not work as well for others as it did for me, but objectively speaking, this is a flat-out hilarious film at the very least. At best, though, it’s a poignant examination of that quarter-life crisis where you have to figure out what the hell you’re going to do with the rest of your life.
© 2004-2009 Ben Waldorf. Posted June 02, 2009. IMDB