Burned out while editing the sprawling wuxia art film Ashes of Time, Kar Wai Wong cleared his head in a most unusual way: He made, on the fly, the superior Chungking Express. American Beauty perpetrator Sam Mendes tried something similar with the thirtysomething dramedy Away We Go, filmed quickly as he pieced together Revolutionary Road. Trouble is, there are few directors less likely to cut loose than Mendes. His is a ponderously heavy filmmaking style, and the result is two films that feel overly fussed over, not just one.
To his credit, Mendes does his best to play second fiddle to the script. So let’s blame that. Written by married novelists Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, Away We Go follows expecting couple John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph as they tour the U.S., ostensibly to find a new home. More accurately they’re out to meet an all-star gallery of grotesques, each one offering a bleak portrait of parenthood.
Within Away We Go lies a genuinely searching exploration of free-floating, preparental anxieties; an early scene finds Rudolph wondering aloud if the low-income, early-30s couple are simply fuck-ups. Trenchant, oddball observations pop up infrequently (chiefly in an underplayed scene with jilted father Paul Schneider), but more often the film feels like a hipster version of North.
Krasinski and Rudolph run afoul of parents who are careless (Allison Janney and JimGaffigan), earthy hippies (MaggieGyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton) and secretly miserable (Chris Messina and Melanie Lynskey). Not even Krasinski’s own folks (Catherine O’Hara and Jeff Daniels) get out unscathed. Each actor is encouraged to go to 11—the aim isn’t to scare the soon-to-be parents into what they could become but to practice simple smug superiority.
As the central couple, the stars do their best to play down the cartoonishness. Krasinski needs a new shtick fast (resembling a Geico caveman doesn’t count), but Rudolph is shockingly grounded—an actual human being among one-note caricatures. Together they’re believably comfortable, but it’s an uphill battle.
Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius cleverly avoided sentiment when chronicling his parents’ deaths; here Rudolph’s deceased folks become the catalyst for near-teary monologues. Its soundtrack is pure Garden State ick, while one bizarre, borderline campy scene combines pole dancing, the Velvet Underground and unsparing talk of miscarriages. Eggers clearly wrote the dense, scatterbrained dialogue, but it’s depressing that his inspired loopiness has apparently curdled into standard-issue quirk. Surely it’s no coincidence that the ad campaign is Juno-esque. C-
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