Courtesy of Focus Features
Because Ann Arbor has 826michigan, one of the 826 writing centers begun in San Francisco by writer/publisher Dave Eggers, we were treated to an early screening of the film “Away We Go,” co-written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, the writer and Eggers’ wife, directed by Sam Mendes and starring a slew of star actors, like Jon Krasinski, Maya Rudolph, Catherine O’Hara, Jeff Daniels, etc., etc.
For those who haven’t heard of it, here’s the trailer:
And now, my thoughts on the film. (If you don’t want any spoilers, than don’t continue reading.)
The story amuses. Rudolph’s character, Verona (impeccable name, by the way), learns that she’s pregnant, and she and her significant other, Burt (Krasinski), take off in search of a new place to live and raise their baby. By all accounts, they’re an off-beat couple: Verona is a medical artist who draws pictures of the insides of humans, doesn’t believe in marriage (though she’s faithful and committed to Burt) and lost her parents when she was 22 and in college. Burt is a college dropout who now sells insurance futures (insurance for insurance companies, we’re told) and has to use a fake, deeper voice with clients on the phone to hide his youth.
Together, they travel all over the country — to Phoenix, to visit one of Verona’s former bosses (an over-written, inappropriate yet mostly hilarious Allison Janney); to Tuscon, to visit Verona’s single sister who works at a hotel/spa/resort; to Montreal, to stay with two of the couple’s college friends; and to Miami, to visit Burt’s brother, whose wife only recently left him and their young daughter.
Needless to say, lots of great landscape footage — the Arizona desert, the Miami Beach’s Art Deco-lined beaches at night — and the rest of the camera work is great, too. With Sam Mendes behind the camera, I’m hardly surprised.
That said, I bought a ticket to the movie because of the Eggers/Vida screenplay collaboration. Which, in the end, left me impressed though a bit ambivalent. Here’s why.
The two leads, Krasinski and Rudolph, are fantastic, realistic, pitch-perfect. Yet I will defer to The New York Times’s Karen Durbin here:
…in “Away We Go,” they are both subtle, working off each other like expert musicians who have been playing together for years. Her Verona is the more opaque; she’s quiet and, without seeming sour or depressed, doesn’t smile a lot. During a visit with Burt’s narcissistic parents, she’s polite but just reserved enough that we know she thinks they are awful. We come to feel the weight of their situation — her advancing pregnancy, their lack of a proper home — in her pensiveness.
It’s a fascinating performance, because, like her character, she doesn’t come to us: we have to read her. By contrast, Mr. Krasinski’s shaggy Burt is a warm enthusiast, hoping for the best. At one point, he explodes at some truly terrible people, and Mr. Krasinski shows us a man so angry it makes him inspired, but, true to his character, never mean.
Most of all, though, Mr. Krasinski and Ms. Rudolph show us how they mesh — he buoys her, she grounds him. The result is one of the most credible couples ever to grace a movie screen. In the few scenes where Burt and Verona are apart, we wait to see them together because that’s when they each seem most whole.
I completely agree — and I’m hardly surprised at all. In a Q-and-A after the show, Eggers explained that he and Vida wrote the screenplay together, cobbling together notes and experiences and off-color comments made at Vida who was pregnant during the writing of the screenplay. Watching the film, you see the strong writing of Eggers and Vida channeled into the two leads; they’re well developed, relatable, interesting; and there really aren’t any lulls or dips in their story, either.
Where the film lags, I felt, was in the other characters in Verona and Burt’s orbit. Mind you, I liked the idea of taking these two great lead characters all over the country; a frequent piece of advice in writing a story is to take your characters away from their home, putting them in different locations and situations. This film certainly does that. But the people they meet and interact with in those locations rang hollow.
Allison Janney was hilarious; in fact, she was too hilarious to seem realistic — every other inappropriate joke and utterance was a “bum-bum-tish” moment, a lewd, cringeworthy punch line. And her husband was the stereotypical drinking, depressed parent inexplicably wed to a loudmouth nutso.
The couple in Montreal who were friends with Burt and Verona in college started off well — live in a nice, elegant flat in the city; clever, talented kids (though their performing the “Goodbye, Farewell” song from Sound of Music was a bit much). But the revelation at a Montreal bar in the wee morning hours that their friend’s wife has had five miscarriages while said wife performed an amateur pole dance didn’t feel right. It should’ve been sincere and touching and tragic, but the location and the pole dance clashed with that.
And Burt’s brother in Miami — well, his cameo was just too short to develop his character at all. He’s here and gone in minutes, a throwaway character.
Fortunately, Burt and Verona are in pretty much every scene in the movie, and they’re spot on, a joy to watch. Eggers and Vida: You’ve impressed (at least me) once again. Is there any form they can’t take on?
