[rating:4.5]
Director: Sam Mendes
Starring: Krasinski, Maya Rudolph, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Catherine O’Hara
This is a really good movie. It’s touching, it’s funny, and it takes universal themes and some familiar ideas but makes them feel fresh and original, at the same time catching a certain surreal feeling in its characters’ lives. There should be more movies this good.
While Away We Go‘s opening gag leans in the direction of all modern film comedies, extracting laughs from the squeamishness of a too-much-information scene (extreme case: all the naked penis in Forgetting Sarah Marshall), the humor is mostly understated and well-developed rather than gross-out. And there’s a surprising amount of drama. This movie is about two people figuring out not their relationship to one another, which is never threatened, but their relationship to the world as they prepare to have their first child. There was a goddamned lot of sniffling in the theater at some of the more touching character moments.
You got Sam Mendes directing, comparing favorably to his work in American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, though there’s less star-power here. You’ve got celebrated novelist/memoirist Dave Eggers and his wife, Vendela Vida, writing the thing. And you’ve got stars who don’t overwhelm you with their resume, backed by really notable character actors. John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph are really very good, Krasinski despite being decked out pretty much like your average manchild hipster douche, and Rudolph despite being a Saturday Night Live cast member, which makes her ability to really act a delightful surprise. Behind them, Catherine O’Hara, Jeff Daniels, as slightly heightened avatars of the obnoxiously self-absorbed Baby Boom, and Maggie Gyllenhaal as a navel-gazing New Age nutball.
The movie has drawn criticism, partly for a self-conscious indy soundtrack (criticism deserved), for being overly quirky (sorry to not bore you?) and “smug” (I defer to Roger Ebert, who suggests it’s okay to be smug if you really are better) and for having a kind of obvious structure: Our couple are not sure how they fit into the world, and as they prepare to become parents, they visit several families and see specific examples of what could go wrong: the neglectful parents, the smothering parents, etc. Is that a little forced, and is the way they go out looking for what they had all along a little … pat? Well, yeah, but it’s not the structure, it’s what they do within it, and what they do is give us a sweet, entertaining movie that walks us through some oddball worlds and brings us to some character moments that are touching because they’re so earned.
Mendes layers the movie with little visual cues for the characters’ sense of shared isolation, and underplays so many things that would be blown up big by a lesser filmmaker.
It’s summer. What the hell is anyone doing releasing quiet character comedies from Miramax-y directors? It’s crazy, I know, but you’ve still got a few weeks before the Transformers and the kid wizards and the grossout/shock comedies for teenagers. If you’ve seen Star Trek enough times, and didn’t mind that Up was way less “up” than Nemo or Toy Story, then see this thing before the robots chase it to video.
Tags: comedy, sam mendes
