 Sam Mendes seemed to have put himself in a rut. Ten years ago, when Steven Spielberg personally asked Mendes - who was a successful theatre director but had no film experience - to direct a film, it must have raised many an eyebrow. The result - American Beauty - was everything but a disappointment. With a wonderful script by Alan Ball, exquisite camerawork by the late Conrad Hall and a career altering, deadpan performance by Kevin Spacey, American Beauty became known as the "Death of a Salesman of the Nineties" and bagged Mendes an Oscar.
But everything after that, came out as just plain wrong. Mendes would continue - to our common loss - making heartless, visually breathtaking films. Road to Perdition felt like a movie that kept wishing it were something else: an award-winning play, a grand novel or an epic poem where Paul Newman and a miscast Tom Hanks were so self-conscious that it came to the point of suffocation. Jake Gyllenhaal's intense performance in Mendes's next, the Gulf War movie Jarhead, which was part absurdist drama, part personal observational commentary and part hormonal explosion, had numerous arresting moments but as a whole felt empty and tentative. Revolutionary Road was impeccably shot, studiously staged and passionately acted by Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio but was an exceptionally deadening experience.
It's taken Sam Mendes ten years to make another great picture. With a surprising change of direction, Mendes has made with the generous help of Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida's fine screenplay and Ellen Kuras's warm cinematography, a road movie that's the kind of gem that's easy to crush with hype or over praise.
 Here, a cheerful, somewhat disorganized couple in their early 30s, Verona (Maya Rudolph) and bespectacled college dropout Burt (John Krasinski)- who both give relaxed, lived-in performances as a couple comfortable with each other's quirks - head off in a battered Volvo from their run-down immobile home in the woods of Colorado to see his parents. Impending parenthood has persuaded them to reconsider their behavior and their curious jobs affect their attitudes: she's an artist specializing in depicting the interior of the human body; he advises on insurance futures. He proposes marriage regularly and she always refuses. "Are we f***-ups?" she asks.
Her parents have been dead for 12 years, so in search of family stability Verona and Burt have moved to Colorado to be near Burt's mother and father. But suddenly, these two leftover hippy types announce they're renting out their house to spend two years in Antwerp. So Verona and Burt embark on a journey to find the perfect place to raise the daughter they're expecting, a disillusioning odyssey that takes them to Arizona, the Midwest, Canada, Florida and South Carolina.
In Phoenix, they meet Verona's old work colleague (Allison Janney), a loud-mouth misfit with a thuggish husband given to apocalyptic thoughts and greyhound racing. In nearby Tucson, with a landscape familiar from western films, they have lunch with Verona's successful, power-dressed sister (Carmen Ejogo), who has her own compact single life. The worst encounter comes in Wisconsin when visiting Burt's crazy feminist cousin, an academic married to a doctrinaire tree-hugger, a couple who believe that putting a child into a stroller is a crime.
After this explosive reunion, they visit an old college friend in Montreal, who has five adopted children with her well-off husband but is extremely depressed. Finally, they're called to Miami by Burt's brother whose wife has left him to bring up their daughter on his own.
During this fraught, affecting visit, Verona has an epiphany about her own childhood which clarifies their lives. Everywhere, they've learnt lessons about how not to raise children: apparently, the answer to their problems is that they don't have to depend on the support of friends or the kindness of strangers.
Away We Go is a very funny film, but the straight, almost cartoonish comedy of the first few encounters shifts into a subtler, more enriching study of parenthood-its joys, its surprises, and the sheer heartbreaking of bringing new life into the world.
P.S. Away We Go starts off with an extraordinary pre-credit sequence which would be too risqué to describe in this review.
– Ali Sultan
*YUCK
**WHATEVER
***GOOD
****SUPER
*****AWESOME |
