Home Sweet Home

Natural performances save Dave Eggers, Vendela Vida and Sam Mendes from themselves.

by Shaun Brady

[CITY PAPER GRADE: B]

It turns out all Sam Mendes needed was a vacation. A ragged road movie shot on a break during Revolutionary Road, Away We Go finds the director's usual heavy hand relax its grip. When he's not feeling compelled to decry the suburbs as the circle of hell which Dante dared not describe, Mendes actually has a sense of humor.

It helps that the script, by husband-and-wife novelists Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, strikes a tone of warm-and-fuzzy quirkiness that doesn't allow for Mendes' trademark displays of bitterness. The story follows Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph), young soon-to-be parents who traipse from city to city on a search for the perfect place to raise their kid, finding a cautionary example at each stop. Mendes allows the story to ramble casually between episodes, keeping the road map in his back pocket.

Its opening scene, a deadpan discussion of "vaginal flavors" during oral sex, threatens 90 minutes of the sort of self-satisfied wise-assery that too often intrudes on Eggers' fiction. (The strange new taste ends up being the revelation of Verona's pregnancy, making this a bizarre-meets-cute intro between parents and unborn child.) But the film soon settles into a less strident pace, driven less by its authors' whims than by the casual airs of its leads. Much credit belongs to Krasinski and Rudolph, who generate a chummy chemistry that submerges the worst tendencies of writers and director under an atmosphere of lived-in amiability.

The cast comes to the rescue of material that, although sharply penned, could come off as contrived in less capable hands. Thus the plot-motoring announcement by Burt's parents (Jeff Daniels and Catherine O'Hara) that they've sold their house and are moving to Belgium just prior to the baby's birth. Daniels and O'Hara strike just the right note of exasperating daffiness. Their tchotchke-filled house is one place where Mendes' penchant for stiflingly art-directed split-level ugliness comes in handy.

With his parents skipping the country, hers long dead in an accident and both untethered freelancers, the couple come to the conclusion that they are, in fact, a pair of "fuck-ups" and decide to quickly make a better life for themselves before baby makes three. The remainder unfolds as a series nightmare scenarios of potential family life which play into the couple's worst fears of their own fates.

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

Allison Janney and Jim Gaffigan save what could have been overbroad ugly-American caricatures with a still broad, but undeniably funny turn as a caustic pair loudly berating their oblivious kids. Maggie Gyllenhaal, however, can do nothing with her fish-in-a-barrel send-up of new-agey overprotectiveness. The best balance is struck, ironically, in territory where Mendes typically goes overboard: exposing the cracks in the seemingly perfect household. A visit with college friends (Chris Messina and Melanie Lynskey) finds a happy household full of adopted children, but a night of drinking strips off the glossy façade. The episode teeters on the edge of a melodramatic cliff when Lynskey decides to expose her discontent with a hoary cliché — the pole dance of misery — but Mendes reins the scene in before it topples into the abyss.

Despite its stumbles, Away We Go accomplishes its most important task, which is giving voice to the fears of a young couple on the verge of parenthood. Though the Gen-Y indicators are perhaps underlined a tad too heavily — Alexei Murdoch's "you'll swear they're Nick Drake" songs, which become increasingly intrusive — there is a valid point in picturing a generation that delays maturation until it's forced upon them.

Though the examples are set before them in a somewhat too-rigorous buffet line, Krasinski and Rudolph absorb their lessons in a more natural fashion. They learn that these models have little to offer two individuals who have to forge their own path, exemplifying the fact that the future can only be faced by living through it, not by cracking its codes. And despite the domus ex machina ending, Mendes manages to end with a couple in a house promising hope, not apocalypse. Seems the growing up didn't only happen on screen.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Away We Go | A Focus Features release, Directed by Sam Mendes, Opens Friday at Ritz East