Fridae

Faced with the impending arrival of their baby – and the realisation that they might be screw-ups leading an unsuccessful life, Burt and Verona embark on a road trip across North America to find a place to settle down as a family.

Vernon says:

It’s said that if you work hard enough on a ponderous, soul-destroying project, you’d end up giving birth to a piece of truly creative art. I’m sure that must have been the relationship between Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road and Away We Go. All that overwrought, narcissistic angst of the couple in Revolutionary Road seems to have tested the limits of the director’s patience and common sense, and with Away We Go, Sam Mendes seems to have offered his own criticism of the unreal histrionics of his earlier movie by turning its premise on its head.

Here, suburban angst is transmuted into suburban comedy: the road trip of Burt and Verona (the protagonists for this piece) essentially propels them into encounters with a parade of alternate reality versions of Frank and April (the protagonists from Revolutionary Road), who are screwed up beyond belief in their unique way – and that’s where the brilliance of the comedy lies.

There’s Burt’s middle-class hippie-wannabe parents; Verona's former boss, a monstrously negligent and grossly offensive parent whose antics grate on her long suffering husband and children; Burt’s nonsensically radical cousin (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal); their college buddies, secretly unhappy model parents raising a United Nations family; and Burt's over-anxious and depressed brother coping with a sudden break-up. Everyone’s hung up, everyone’s offering hilariously bad (or good) parenting advice, and the funniest thing is how their screwed up situations aren’t actually fatal, soul-destroying flaws. Everyone may be uniquely screwed up, but that's life, and the world won't stop turning because of it.

For a director whose most famous films have been about family tragedies and suburban angst, it’s as if Mendes has finally discovered the levity of life, the non-fatality of tragic flaws, and that comedy is far harder to do than tragedy – and a far greater art.

Enming says:

One of this reviewer's personal favorites for the year 2009, Away We Go, was shot by Sam Mendes back to back with Revolutionary Road. Together, they form an intimate diptych of American family life in two very different time periods: the prosperous but conservative 50s of suburbia, and the cosmopolitan but relatively impoverished end of the 00s with the country struggling in the wake of economic tsunamis.

Mendes must have worked off all his pent up angst from Revolutionary Road here. Here we see an admirably functional couple, the vocationally struggling Burt and the pregnant Verona Farlander, head across the expanses of America in a classic road trip to find a place to raise their child. They're some of the rarest of characters in movies: nice, whimsical, educated, intelligent, thoughtful and wiser than they think themselves to be. They are economically on the edge, with neither holding a particularly glamourous vocation. He sells insurance. She sketches medical textbooks. They are both college dropouts. As they embark on their road trip to find a home, they came to realize that sometimes what you have been looking for has always been where you are.

Screenplay writers Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, who are married in real life, wrote this story from their hearts and it was wonderfully played by an ensemble cast. Krasinski achieves the ideal balance of naivete and wisdom as Burt, complemented by Maya Rudolph's Verona in a performance of great maturity, warmth and strength. Allison Janney and Maggie Gyllenhaal are rarely funnier than as two of the film's memorable "Mommie Fearests".

Rounding off the film's gorgeous technical credentials are Alexi Murdoch's mellow folksy tunes that punctuate the film almost as a chorus which will stay in your head. Away We Go is the cinematic equivalent of a bittersweet hot cocoa with extra marshmallows prepared by a pair of goofy but wise parents, much like Burt and Verona.

Consensus

This may be Sam Mendes’s best film yet. Perhaps he’ll make comedies from now on!