"Away we go" by Sam Mendes

Maggie Gyllenhaal in a scene from Sam Mendes' "Away We Go" (2009). "His fifth film, “Away We Go,” continues the Brit stage director’s track record of tackling different eras in the American experience (earlier: the Thirties in “Road to Perdition,” the Fifties in the god-awful “Revolutionary Road,” and the two diametrically opposed halves of the Nineties in “Jarhead” and “American Beauty”), only to refract them back to us as collections of inanities. Kate Winslet’s halting student theater workshop delivery in “Revolutionary Road,” Annette Bening’s hysterical fits of self-flagellation in “American Beauty,” Jake Gyllenhaal trying out masculinity in “Jarhead”. I imagine actors love working with Mendes—it’s obvious he lets them do whatever they like. “Away We Go”‘s protagonists, Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph), are two disheveled postmillennial (in a stroke of foresight, seemingly post Dubya as well) Grups who just haven’t quite figured out this crazy thing called life. The horror show that follows takes Burt and Verona from Allison Janney’s crassly negligent vision of motherhood in Phoenix to Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton’s creepy Madison New Agers, to Chris Messina and Melanie Lynskey’s stable (but with a tragic secret) brood of adoptees in Montreal. “Away We Go” was cowritten by husband-and-wife literary duo Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, and their preciousness intermarries all-too-well with Mendes’s cool perfectionism. Knock McSweeney’s all you like (there’s ample room), but Dave Eggers isn’t to be taken too lightly. He can turn a phrase, credibly inhabit a voice (see his Sudanese Lost Boy memoir “What Is the What”), and he even approaches real empathy when he’s not too busy burying it in layers of extraneous writing. There are good ideas in “Away We Go,” some sensitive stuff about parenthood and family that feel lived-in (and mesh well with Eggers’s biography as sketched out in “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”).
Source: www.indiewire.com