We have to apologize to Sam Mendes fans. You may have been a fan of “American Beauty,” “Road To Perdition,” or “Jarhead.” Maybe you were even enamored with last year’s ill-received, [ed. but still underrated] “Revolutionary Road.” But yeah, Sam Mendes is done – with “Away We Go” he reveals that without big stars or a budget, he can make a movie just as empty as guys like Michael Bay or Stephen Sommers. Shot like a very special episode of your favorite sitcom, and scored with the scent of desperation by people with no faith in their actors or script, not a single moment of this contemporary affair in navel-gazing feels earned, spontaneous, natural or dramatically efficient.
John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph star as Bert and Verona, a harried lower-middle-class couple who find themselves dealing with the coming of a new baby. With the realization they will have to live for someone other than themselves, and the sudden uprooting of the would-be grandparents lead the couple to embark on a journey to see where the ideal home would be. In selecting a number of old friends and family members, they hope to find a place with a support system already installed, having wavering confidence in their own ability to function independently.
It’s a reasonable understanding for the parents of Generation X and Post-Gen X, the worry that lifestyles lived independently of strong parental figures and underneath the sway of the information-and-technological age will leave them unprepared when they haven’t followed a financially lucrative muse. And of course there’s the more universal emotions emerging from a couple bringing a life into the world for the very first time. It’s intimidating in a socio-economic way, but also in the fact that you must now cater your life, loves, pet peeves and instincts towards another human being.
Sam Mendes sees it another way. In each trip, he sees a chance to expound on his seemingly TV-bound way of seeing people, leaning on the frame-filling two-shot to emphasize the barren thematic content of the movie’s conceit. The film attempts to present its characters as very real people, eschewing metaphor and symbolism in favor of genuine human relativity. If only the script, by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, was at any point interested in creating real people. The first half of the film is a huge miscalculation, marginalizing its protagonists as reaction shots as they encounter a number of over-the-top caricatures meant to emphasize the normality of our leads. With Krasinski’s limited acting repertoire (you’re never entirely certain if he’s being sincere – a TV actor if there ever was one), it often plays like a terrible episode of “The Office,” with Jim stranded in a sea of Dwights.
Moreso, the film portrays a fairly faithless portrayal of parenthood. In an early encounter with Verona’s former boss (Allison Janney, never worse), we see children cruelly at the mercy of their callous, chatty parents, a couple at two different volumes who not for a single moment acknowledging their partner’s often hurtful words. Later on, a contentious dinner table sequence with John’s childhood friend (Maggie Gyllenhaal, possibly inspired by some of Rudolph’s worst “Saturday Night Live” characters), Mendes places the camera behind the head of the scene’s single child so that we do not see his face during the altercation. This would be a provocative creative choice forcing the viewer to consider the mindset of said child until the sequence closes with the child being used as a prop during a deserved-but-still-cruel joke.
Mendes doesn’t trust any of his collaborators. Most, if not all, of the film’s dramatic beats are scored by songs from singer-songwriter Alexi Murdoch, which is first only mildly intrusive and eventually just lazy. When there’s a unique moment of dramatic heft, slipping a song under the proceedings might not hurt. When you’re dealing with very mundane situations in hopes they bear dramatic fruit, it undercuts any universal relatability to the situation.
When the film ceases to be the world’s most obnoxious travelogue, the pace slows down, and we do get a flicker of the personality these characters have. When allowed to embrace his own ironic comic charm, Krasinski is an agreeable presence, and Rudolph is especially luminous, even if her character has to embrace the more unstable elements of a soon-to-be-mom. But their main conflict is never clearly in focus, as it’s a small interpersonal issue mostly resolved without words between couples that love each other. And yet, Mendes lets them talk. And talk. And talk. Their conversations remain structured in the same way too, with a disagreement threatening to become a full-blown argument before being defused by a sometimes ironic joke or gag. It’s sweet that these sketches of a character do seem to be in love, but it doesn’t mine any serious dramatic conflict out of the very real tension in such situations that often bubble over at unexpected moments. Like the film, the relationship is ensconced in its own protective bubble, an insular show of affections that manifests around other people with their defenses up and their attitudes set to “reactive.” Isn’t it amusing how the two react to some of their lifelong friends and family members like they’ve never met before and are now surprised by their personality quirks?
Both Maya Rudolph and John Krazinski are likable enough that you’d like to see them as a couple in another movie (probably a TV show), but they aren’t served by a script that celebrates oblivious navel-gazing under the impression of humanism. Surprising that a movie about childbirth ends up being one of the coldest, most distant and inhuman releases of the summer so far. [C-]