Riding out middle-class malaise

Sam Mendes must love to craft portraits of American middle-class life - either that or he's a masochist habitually putting himself through hell. In both Revolutionary Road (2008) and American Beauty (1999), the director examines the pitfalls and quiet indignities of middle-class life. Away We Go is lighter and smarter than its predecessors, but it exhibits a similarly idiosyncratic combination of charm and artificiality.

Partially a road movie, Away We Go follows a barely employed Burt Farlander (John Krasinski) and a parentless Verona De Tessant (Maya Rudolph) to Phoenix, Tucson, Madison, Montreal and Miami in search of a place to call home after Farlander's parents decide to take an extended vacation just three months before De Tessant is due to give birth to the couple's first child. Rudolph is refreshingly understated, and Krasinski is nothing if not earnest as the pair endures a series of colorful couples who attempt to interest them in settling down in their various corners of the country.

There are some laughs as we are confronted with caricatures of New Age nut jobs (Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton) and ignorant nine-to-fivers (Allison Janney and Jim Gaffigan), but the tale is generally a poignant one.

Farlander and De Tessant confront their difficulties and insecurities in a series of nighttime scenes by muttering the necessity to "ride it out" back and forth to one another as some sort of inexplicable reassurance. Frankly, it seems a depressing philosophy, akin to the moral contained in the exceedingly heavy-handed Revolutionary Road, which entices viewers by asking the question, "Is it possible to break free?" - only to answer with an emphatic "No!" after two excruciating hours, as if one needed yet another tedious object lesson in the alienating effects of suburbia on sensitive souls.  

Unlike either of Mendes' previous treatments of this subject matter, Away We Go seems to provide some hope - however guarded - regarding the redeeming power of family. This is doubtless the influence of writer Dave Eggers, who co-authored the story with Vendela Vida. Like Rudolph's De Tessant, Eggers - known primarily for his association with the institution that is McSweeny's - is himself an orphan and an older sibling. His humbly titled first novel, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2009), explores similar themes: creating family out of thin air, the hopefulness of love and the difficulties of maintaining lasting relationships. Eggers' stamp is felt in another way as well, insofar as he suffers from the same disease as Mendes when it comes to inserting clever peculiarities that call attention to themselves and detract from a feeling of heightened realism.

Some of these oddities are found in the dialogue. Jeff Daniels' character (Farlander's father) possesses a penchant for ironic, and ostensibly accidental, slips of the tongue. "Indigenous" becomes "indigent," for example, and eventually "ingenious." As a comedic device, this is too clever by half, and hardly the sort of thing the typical middle-aged American male is prone to parroting. De Tessant's girlfriend's moronic husband (Gaffigan) sounds like a mouthpiece for David Mamet with lines like, "Oh well, if this country is shit, than everyone else is the flies on the shit." If bourgeois alcoholics uttered lines as entertaining as these, gated communities would be much more appealing places to be.

And therein lies the main problem with Mendes' work in this vein: In order to render what are essentially boring people and mind-numbing places in life even passably entertaining onscreen, he ends up presenting characters and scenarios that lack plausibility.   

Take, for another example, what could have been a rather touching moment when two old friends of Farlander's reveal their pain over suffering a fifth miscarriage. This is stripped of its reality by the fact that the well-to-do young mother in question is pole dancing at an amateur night directly in front of the hubby while he confesses his sense of loss.

Do scenes like these occur in life? It seems doubtful. If they do, they give meaning to the phrase "stranger than fiction."  

Away We Go is funny and affecting in places, and eminently watchable. It's just a shame that Mendes and his team have taken the bricks and mortar of everyday life and transformed them into a muted fairytale.

James Walling can be reached at
jwalling@praguepost.com