Sam Mendes (2009)
Released just a few months after Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road, Away We Go is more successful, even if a lot less ambitious. (It compares similarly with Mendes’s Road To Perdition.) For a road movie it takes time and a few places to get going. A young couple, Bert and Verona, are expecting their first child. Her parents died when she was in college; when Bert’s parents, who live close by, decide to cross the Atlantic to live in Antwerp for two years, he and Verona – who anyway feel rootless and aimless in their lives and are anxious to do right by their unborn child – decide this is an opportunity themselves to move, and to think about where they want to raise their baby. They go to Phoenix, Tucson, Madison, Montreal and Miami on their travels – visiting family and old friends – before reaching an unidentified (and, to me, unidentifiable) final destination. (The picture is divided into sections headed ‘Away To [next port of call]’ before concluding with ‘Home’.) Each stage on the journey draws attention to a different disquieting aspect of parenthood. The exceedingly schematic screenplay by husband and wife Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida lacks cumulative power: to describe Away We Go as less than the sum of its parts is an understatement. Fortunately, though, several of the parts are very lively – thanks to some good dialogue and excellent actors, well directed by Sam Mendes.
I never got clear how poor or otherwise the main couple were. The place they live in at the start is pretty primitive; he doesn’t seem to have a proper job (or, at least, makes the odd half-hearted attempt to find something different from selling insurance futures by cellphone); she works from home (I didn’t pick up as what – Stephanie Zacharek’s review says as a medical illustrator). Whatever, their circumstances present no problem with costs of travel – by car, plane and train, at different points of the journey – or with acquiring the house they end up in. In Phoenix, the couple meet Verona’s old friend, the publicly plain-speaking Lily and her blue collar prophet-of-doom husband Lowell, and their two kids: Lily cheerfully explains that her prepubertal daughter is a lesbian in the making and demonstrates her son’s profound uncommunicativeness. In Tucson, they meet Verona’s sister Grace – this episode fizzles out. Things liven up considerably in Madison in the ménage of Ellen (LN), daughter of an old friend/flame of Bert’s father and now a hippie-cum-feminist academic psychologist. LN is vehemently opposed to buggies (‘strollers’) – ‘Why should I want to push my children away from me?’ She lives with a languidly contemptuous layabout called Roderick (he claims to have an Electra complex and, when Verona asks if he means an Oedipus complex, derisively tells her not to tell him what he feels). In Montreal, their old college friends Tom and Munch have a house full of happy, ethnically various, adopted children: it’s only when the foursome go out for the evening that the misery of Munch’s successive miscarriages becomes clear. Bert receives a phone call from his brother Courtney, whose wife has walked out and left him with their daughter. They go to see Courtney in Miami, during which visit Bert, for the nth time, proposes marriage to Verona and gets turned down. (She just doesn’t see the point.) Lying side by side in Courtney’s garden, the couple make an alternative series of twee eccentric vows to each other and their child. Then it’s ‘Home’. (The film ends before the baby – a daughter – is born.)
Perhaps because the material is basically thin and it’s hard to care that much about Bert’s and Verona’s soul- and home-searching, the two leads are less satisfying than the cameos, although John Krasinski (Bert) confirms the good impression he made in Leatherheads: he knows how to use his gangling charm without overworking it. I’d never seen Maya Rudolph (Verona) before: she’s a sometimes opaque presence and it’s often hard to make out what she’s saying. Even allowing for the fact that Lily is meant to speak embarrassingly clearly, Allison Janney’s resonant audibility makes you aware of how much you’re missing of Rudolph’s lines. Janney, one of my favourite supporting actresses, brings terrific brio to her role. She’s matched by Maggie Gyllenhaal (LN), who really should be getting more lead parts – I can’t think of another young American actress with her combination of physical presence and emotional range. Having so recently lamented Chris Messina’s unrewarding parts in Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Julie and Julia, I was pleased to see him with something better here: in the Montreal sequence, he gets over the sadness behind Tom’s affability – without losing the affability. Melanie Lynskey (whom I don’t remember seeing since Heavenly Creatures) is quietly affecting as Munch. Paul Schneider, in his short appearance as Courtney, creates a remarkably complete character: we see that Courtney is honourable and rather pedantically thoughtful – and (therefore) why his wife might have had enough of him. Jeff Daniels and Catherine O’Hara enjoy themselves as Bert’s parents. (They’re obviously meant to be deeply selfish in taking off just when the baby’s due, although it quite pleased me to see two grandparents-to-be giving priority to their own plans rather than putting themselves at the service of their kid and his kid.) Jim Gaffigan and Josh Hamilton do well as Lowell and Roderick respectively. Mendes doesn’t himself do much to bring each location to life but he’s helped by the services of the versatile production designer Jess Gonchor (The Devil Wears Prada, No Country For Old Men). The music written for the film by Alexi Murdoch is drippily appropriate to the core of the piece but the songs chosen to score various episodes (‘Golden Brown’ during the gruesome dinner with LN and Roderick, George Harrison’s ‘What is Life?’) give the proceedings a lift.
20 September 2009
