Away We Go (12A.)
Directed by Sam Mendes.
Starring John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph, Jeff Daniels, Maggie Gyllenhall, Alison Janney, Catherine O’Hara. 98 mins
There’s a party scene in Animal House where a guest starts to sing while strumming an acoustic songs and John Belushi wrenches it from his hands and smashes it against the wall, shattering it into many pieces. If only life were like that. I kept thinking of that as another wispy singer songwriter popped up on the soundtrack emphasising the feeling of a couple living their life like it was the last scene of The Graduate
And while we’re at it – Damn You Wes Anderson. The Scorsese of Twee has cast a long shadow over makers of generic indie relationship comedy and now Oscar winner Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road) seems to have fallen under his spell with this comedy drama about a couple travelling across the States, visiting relatives and friends, as they try and chose a place to settle and live when their first child arrives in three months.
I enjoyed Away We Go – it’s a mostly agreeable film of moderate competence – but I wouldn’t say I liked it. There seems to be a flaw in the structure of the script by acclaimed novelists Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida.
The narrative casts the main couple, Krasinski and Rudolph, as the sole representation of sanity and normality, besieged by the various representations of lunacy and desperation they meet on their trip. But there is something rather glib and smug about the way they turn up at these people’s house, after a few minutes judge them to be wanting, and move swiftly on without a second thought.
I can follow the thinking behind casting two TV performers who’ve only been in movie supporting roles previously (Krasinski is a very good Martin Freeman in the American version of The Office while Rudolph was a long standing Saturday Night Live performer.) It emphasises their ordinariness but, although they give adept performances, I don’t think you really warm to them.
Nevertheless the film is fine and substantially enjoyable as long as it is predominately comic but towards the end when the film starts to pass round the hat looking for some emotional contribution from the audience you start to feel impatient. The final fifteen minutes squanders a lot of good will. Rudolph has a little monologue about some tree when she was a child and I’ll admit as soon as she started I just tuned out confident that whatever pithy insight she was going to come up with wouldn’t have been earnt.
Directed by Sam Mendes.
Starring John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph, Jeff Daniels, Maggie Gyllenhall, Alison Janney, Catherine O’Hara. 98 mins
There’s a party scene in Animal House where a guest starts to sing while strumming an acoustic songs and John Belushi wrenches it from his hands and smashes it against the wall, shattering it into many pieces. If only life were like that. I kept thinking of that as another wispy singer songwriter popped up on the soundtrack emphasising the feeling of a couple living their life like it was the last scene of The Graduate
And while we’re at it – Damn You Wes Anderson. The Scorsese of Twee has cast a long shadow over makers of generic indie relationship comedy and now Oscar winner Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Revolutionary Road) seems to have fallen under his spell with this comedy drama about a couple travelling across the States, visiting relatives and friends, as they try and chose a place to settle and live when their first child arrives in three months.
I enjoyed Away We Go – it’s a mostly agreeable film of moderate competence – but I wouldn’t say I liked it. There seems to be a flaw in the structure of the script by acclaimed novelists Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida.
The narrative casts the main couple, Krasinski and Rudolph, as the sole representation of sanity and normality, besieged by the various representations of lunacy and desperation they meet on their trip. But there is something rather glib and smug about the way they turn up at these people’s house, after a few minutes judge them to be wanting, and move swiftly on without a second thought.
I can follow the thinking behind casting two TV performers who’ve only been in movie supporting roles previously (Krasinski is a very good Martin Freeman in the American version of The Office while Rudolph was a long standing Saturday Night Live performer.) It emphasises their ordinariness but, although they give adept performances, I don’t think you really warm to them.
Nevertheless the film is fine and substantially enjoyable as long as it is predominately comic but towards the end when the film starts to pass round the hat looking for some emotional contribution from the audience you start to feel impatient. The final fifteen minutes squanders a lot of good will. Rudolph has a little monologue about some tree when she was a child and I’ll admit as soon as she started I just tuned out confident that whatever pithy insight she was going to come up with wouldn’t have been earnt.
