Away We Go: Not Perfect, But Still Highly Entertaining

June 27th, 2009 by cbwilkins | Posted in Picture blog |

I’d been looking forward to seeing Away We Go for a while, and I got to yesterday. Here’s the trailer for it, which represents it pretty well, as a quirky indie-like comedy. The movie’s plot is pretty simple, Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) are having a baby. Burt’s parents decide to move to Europe, leaving the couple without a support system. They decide to visit various cities around North America to decide where they want to settle down and start their new family.

The movie isn’t exactly perfect, it’s not as funny as you might want it to be, and the characters the couple run into, like Maggie Gyllenhaal’s eccentric hippie family and Allison Janney and Jim Gaffigan’s dysfunctional one, aren’t exactly realistic. But, they a
re something of a satire of realistic people, and it’s enough; the fact that these scenes are some of the funniest of the movie doesn’t hurt either. Where the funniest bits of the movie come from though are in it’s surprising moments of vulgarity. It’s a lot like life, things seem Ok, then something a little shocking happens.

That’s where the movie really scores, in the little things. Sam Mendes made one of my all-time favorite movies, American Beauty, but hasn’t done much worth really getting excited about since. But, his willingness to let the actors act, and the writer’s willingness to not have to fill every second of the movie with talking (something I’m bad at doing myself), makes this engaging, and enjoyable to watch.

The movie really hits its stride in the second half, when all the silliness is over, and the couple begin really digging in to what it means to be a family. The best part is that this is a couple that really doesn’t have any issues with each other; they love each other, unconditionally it seems, and their conflicts in the plot come as a pair. It’s a really daring way to attack the situation as filmmakers, cause it’s so easy to have some form of inner strife take up a large portion of the film. Krasinski is pheomenal weekly on The Office and here he comes off a little more frazzled and worried, complete with an awesome beard. Rudolph was hilarious on a hundred levels during her run on Saturday Night Live, and here she is a surprisingly perfect choice; more than anything, her voice is just right. The two of them carry the movie with performances that are better than anything you could reasonably have expected, and this is really a testament to how good of a director Mendes is.

As I said, the movie isn’t perfect, but it’s a great watch, both entertaining and thought provoking, and a good bit sad. I think it would have been better served ending 5 minutes earlier and leaving things a bit more ambiguous (I was screaming in my head “End it! End it now!”), but the ending they give it is reasonable and understandable.