Loading ...Away We Go review
Hushed reverence, please, and perhaps some sombre choral music for the new film from director Sam Mendes, Away We Go, which practically demands you sit up and love it. Even if you don’t want to. Mendes is cinema’s genre-hopping supremo (from gangster picture Road to Perdition to war-is-dull Jarhead), British theatre extraordinaire and beau to Kate Winslet. One wonders if they are any avenues left for this polymath to exhaust. Since his leaden and Oscar-bagging American Beauty, though, Mendes’ varied body of work has come to be something of a double-edged sword: he may have cast off his theatrical shackles by focusing uniquely on American subject matter, but his films have always remained curiously anonymous and devoid of a distinct stylistic palette. Jarhead, was, to many, straightforwardly boring. His slavish adaptation of Richard Yates’ magisterial Revolutionary Road was a prosaic recreation of the novel, with none of its lyricism and depth. He may gaily flit from one genre to the other, but the only thing Mendes appears to specialise in is stultifying mediocrity.
This worrying trend continues with Away We Go, which borrows various aesthetic ingredients from other breakthrough ‘indie’ hits like Sideways, Juno, and Little Miss Sunshine, but has no clear identity of its own. Instead, as the yammering folksy tomes of Alexi Murdoch blare over an insipid montage of air travel for the umpteenth time, and another wantonly ‘wacky’ character actor blunders into frame and espouses some witless parental advice, you may find you’ve broken out in hives. The wilfully cutesy and cloying screenplay from real-life writer couple Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida charts the odyssey of thirty-something slackers Burt and Verona (Jon Krasinski and Maya Rudolph), as they schlep across America trying to find a suitable resting place for their unborn child by visiting various friends and relatives. Conveniently, each of their encounters appears to offer a uniquely different insight into parenting, from the garish Allison Janney, shouting about the elasticity of her breasts in front of her children, to Maggie Gyllenhaal, sauntering about as a whacked-out Earth Mother with an aversion to pushchairs. It’s a thin conceit with a skittish, sitcom-like sensibility that quickly proves maddening.
More egregious are Mendes’ attempts to wed this apparent light-heartedness (Jokes about titled uteri! Jokes about vaginal flavour!) to an undercurrent of real human drama, using traumas such as miscarriage and parental death as cheap and anodyne emotional catharses for his characters to whine about. Whilst undoubtedly the film is well cast and composed with obvious competence, it has no foothold in reality outside of its own self-satisfied smuggery. Syrupy doesn’t quite cover it – it’s more like having treacle inserted into your body intravenously by an unhinged Maya Rudolph whilst a mop-haired Jon Krasinski pelts you with clumps of gorgonzola, grinning like a moron. This indolent streak reaches its apex during a scene in which our two leads sit on a trampoline and pontificate limply about the perils of parenthood, coming to the earth-shattering conclusion that home is where the heart is. They could’ve just read Miriam Stoppard.
Put bluntly, Sam Mendes’ fifth film is exasperating flim-flummery; a string of kitschy vignettes that are dead-eyed, anaemic and ultimately about as deep as a paddling pool. In fact, it presents such a simpering and nauseating image of this perfect couple’s supposed harmony, by the end I was itching to watch von Trier’s Antichrist, and see Charlotte Gainsbourg smash a block of wood onto Willem Dafoe’s penis. That couple’s behaviour felt more realistic.
Infuriatingly self-aware, Away We Go is a yogurt-covered granola bar of a film that assumes that its central characters are inherently entrancing. They aren’t.
