After dealing with some of the most twisted relationships in “American Beauty” and “Revolutionary Road,” for once Sam Mendes gets to deal with one where two people are completely in love, in a relationship where everything seems to be worked out….well, where almost everything is worked out.
Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) are about to have a baby together. They live in a house that is not exactly the ideal place to raise a child. There’s cardboard over a window and it’s not adequately heated. They go to visit Burt’s parents (Catherine O’Hara and Jeff Daniels) for dinner, during which they drop a bombshell on Burt and Verona. This triggers a journey that will take Burt and Verona across North America as they go about trying to find the perfect place to live, picking up pieces of parenting advice from their friends and family along the way.
It is really refreshing to see a film that involves a relationship where the main focus is not the terrible problems that the couple is having. Not that Burt and Verona don’t have problems, they certainly aren’t perfect, but they are so truly in love that it only seems like they don’t have problems.
When they visit Burt’s parents, they tell Burt and Verona that they will be moving to Antwerp, Belgium a month before Verona has her baby. This greatly concerns Burt and Verona as they were probably counting on some support. Burt’s parents don’t even really seem to mind that they will miss the first couple of years of their grandchild’s life.
It’s characters like this that make “Away We Go” such a great experience. It’s a film that is about the supporting characters as much as it’s about the two main characters. Burt and Verona spend the movie trying to figure out the right place and way to raise their child, but it seems like almost everyone they know is a bad parent.
The first place they go to after visiting Burt’s parents is to visit an old boss of Verona’s, Lily (Allison Janey), who is married to Lowell (Jim Gaffigan). Lily is a very outspoken person, saying anything she likes in front of her kids because she believes that they don’t hear her anyway. Lowell always seems down in the dumps and very soft-spoken, probably a result of being married to Lily.
There’s a brief stopover to visit Verona’s sister, Grace (Carmen Ejogo), who, as Verona tells Burt, needs some kind of validation to be with her latest boyfriend. Burt, in all politeness, tries to spin everything about him in a positive light, being for the most part, unsuccessful and far too obvious in his straining to do so.
The weirdest characters that Burt and Verona encounter are an old friend of Burt’s, LN (Maggie Gyllenhaal), and her husband Roderick (Josh Hamilton). They are very into the spiritual side of life and even have a set rule where they don’t believe in the “three s’s:” Separation, Sugar, and Strollers. This all leads to one of the best scenes in the film as they all sit down to dinner.
During this dinner, LN, whose real name is Ellen, but changed it to simply the letters “LN,” and her husband exert an incredibly pompous attitude, acting like their lifestyle is the best, with all others being ignorant. They believe in a family bed and not hiding their lovemaking from their child. Burt even brings a stroller as a gift, but, oh no, that’s one of the “three s’s!” The stroller, however, gets its use in this scene, to Burt and Verona’s (and the audience’s) delight.
We also meet some old friends that Burt and Verona went to college with, Tom (Chris Messina) and Munch Garnett (Melanie Lynskey). This is where the film begins to take a more dramatic turn as we learn about the Garnetts’ life. The final people they meet are Burt’s brother, Courtney (Paul Schneider), whose wife just left him, and Courtney’s daughter, Annabelle (Isabelle Moon Alexander). This all leads up to another great scene, which is a simple conversation between Burt and Verona, in fact, it is this scene and the last 10-15 minutes of the film that put it over the top into greatness.
The performances here are fantastic, especially from Krasinski and Rudolph. I had only ever seen Rudolph on SNL before and thought her acting to be rather two-dimensional. Her portrayal of Verona shows that she’s much more than a comic actress. The supporting cast of eccentrics is a big part of what makes this film so good. It’s comedy and drama mixed at the right proportions and should not be missed.
3.5/4 stars.