Away We Go
If you wondered what TV actors, Jon Krasinski (the American version of The Office) and Maya Rudolph (Saturday Night Live), are doing starring in a Sam Mendes movie, you are asking a fair question.
Away We Go is about an unmarried, pregnant couple (Kransinski and Rudolph) who travel to four different locations in search of the place they want to raise their kids. Written by Dave Eggers (author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) and his wife Vendela Vida (editor of The Believer magazine), this tale of pre-natal adventure reeks of indie-hipster humor and contrivance. It’s shot well enough, and the score is fine (Alexi Murdoch, who wrote songs for Garden State) but the dialogue is too cutesy for TV actors to pull off convincingly.
Krazinski’s Bert character wears "intellectual" glasses and a beard (how original) and rarely utters a straight-forward thought until the end of the film, but Verona (Rudolph) and her sister claim he’s some sort of great catch, when everything he does and says runs anathema to that. Rudolph’s performance is passable, but Krazinski is bland and pedestrian.
Bert’s parents, played by Jeff Daniels and Catherine O’Hara, are cartoonish, as are Maggie Gyllenhaal and Allison Janey so that’s four boorish, unsympathetic characters. However, although Jim Gaffigan is also one-dimensional, he’s surprisingly funny as Lowell, Janey’s husband.
One could suppose the point is to display how everyone has an opinion on how you should raise your child, but it’s overkill and often grating, as when Gyllenhaal tells them she raises her children without strollers because that would be "pushing your child away from you."
Eggers is a tremendous writer, and he’s clearly drawing on his ...Staggering Genius with Verona’s parents dying when she was 22, but the fact he and his wife aren’t screenwriters becomes painfully obvious very early on, and the movie never really takes off. There are a few decent jokes, but you’d be better off just reading Eggers.
